Doors and Windows
by melissaisdown
Summary: Love, light, life and the absence of life. House/Cuddy. Post ep 4x16.
1. The Number Three

I. The Number Three

Alone at night, a mind muses. "If" is a redundant motif. "What if," even more prevalent. Probability, possibility, necessity. Choice, chance, expectation. All things the objective mind considers in the fraction of a second that it makes a decision. And if misled, the heart forces the mind to pursue the lost moment perpetually. A wrong decision is nothing more than the freedom to regret.

Lisa Cuddy is alone and it is night. In the office of Gregory House she stands, burdened by decisions and indecision. Standing so long, she finally sits at his desk with the vain hope that when she does, this burden might remain in the air, alleviated until she stands again. But it does not work, the regret, the pain, the weight is shackled to her shoulders.

In the still and deafening silence, a peculiar ray of white light, some strange combination of the moon and courtyard fluorescence is illuminating her eyeline, intensifying the unique beauty of her expression while she considers and reconsiders. Fortuities and accidents, choices, effects, a series of interconnected events, random but somehow deliberate.

One particular day is vividly replaying in her mind lately. A day of uncertain consequences, she entered this office with the intent of asking one question. And she stood here speechless, unable to form the words, smiling stupidly, ignorant to the long term effects of her inarticulation. "Thank you," was an end to tacit plans,a strange affair they had begun, that would have either left her pregnant with his child or disconnected and alone.

The smitten schoolboy had finally stopped pulling her pigtails. So unexpectedly that she didn't know how to react. A professional mature Greg House is a complete stranger in familiar form. He was actually treating her like a human being, giving her injections, overtly implying she should ask him for a donation. Saying she should ask someone she 'trusts,' someone she 'likes.' In his own way the man was letting her know he would say 'yes', if she asked. And she decided to ask. Without hesitation she entered this office and stared at him interrogatively. Then something happened, some transition, she saw something, as he sat backlit by sunset melting April into May. Potential and repercussions. But she did not see the future. And worse, she was beginning to like him. It couldn't happen. If she felt nothing, if they felt nothing at all - mutually, it could work. But she felt something, as much as she tried to resist it, deny it, she felt it. Feeling would make things obscenely complicated, their working relationship, their parental relationship, it would all change, and she wasn't ready to lose it. The last four years were spent stifling this emotion to sustain their friendship, their positions. So she stopped, the question was intercepted, formed in her brain and never allowed to escape her lips.

Cuddy realized she couldn't stop at having him be a sperm donor, an arbitrary ingredient in the recipe for procreation. She didn't want just a plastic cup. Not anymore, not really. House himself made her realize this. Cuddy needed more, more from him, more from it all. And she knew he couldn't offer her that. Even if he wanted to he couldn't. Mute, she was torn between her unending desire for a child and the universal yearning for a companion. Somebody to share the responsibility, it does after all take two people to make a third. Well, in most cases.

Women who are alone; women dealing with infertility can now joust with Mother Nature using reproductive technology. So, surreally, Cuddy like a large proportion of women today, spent the first half of her life avoiding pregnancy (when she was most fertile) in the name of liberation; and has devoted the latter half to harsh, degrading and, ultimately dangerous forms of human husbandry in an effort to achieve the traditional authentication of womanhood.

Why does this woman need such a trite affirmation anyway? She has an amazing career, a job she's completely devoted to, she runs a successful hospital. Everything she has ever wanted, she's accomplished, attained, exceeded, but it's not enough. It never has been. Incompleteness has made her miserable and House never lets her forget it. A child may provide, love, reward, fulfillment, fun; in addition to compromise, exhaustion, frustration and guilt. But in the back of her mind resides the notion that a baby now may just be a near-menopausal attempt at eternal youth; an antidote to a mid-life crisis. Whatever it would have been it wasn't. Three attempts, three failures, she couldn't make it happen.

Wanting a child (very different from becoming a mother) is, for many, a desire in part triggered by a society that plugs an idealized, highly commercial version of motherhood. Women have babies because it is expected; because they want to hold on to a partner, end loneliness or fight boredom. For Cuddy it was an alternative to resuming practice as a full time doctor. Replacing one childhood dream with another seemed sufficient. And eventually after a trio of trials ending in miscarriage, she recognized it as as much.

So she stopped. Got back on the pill, continued moving forward without ever looking back.

Until now.

Now, as she sits pensively rationalizing, many more factors are involved. It's been more than a year since the miscarriage. A death she had to mourn alone, one that House and most didn't even know about. He knew she was pregnant then, the bastard diagnosed her before she even knew. But she never told anyone. More than a year. A lot has happened. A lot has changed. Cuddy has changed. And even though she got off the pill a month ago, it could be months before she can begin the fertility meds, and a year before any realistic odds for pregnancy. Time is a hurdle in a race she's afraid she's already lost. So she sits here longer, thinking. The bus crash and the many effects felt by it commenced for Cuddy, some emotional metamorphosis. She almost lost House three times. Fears always come to her in threes. The first was mostly shock, nothing more than a near-experience, an almost-happening. House was fine when she saw him after the crash, he was functioning, he was House, so she never registered it as anything more than a convenient avoidance of cataclysm. Cuddy concealed her concern, a habit, a reflex.

The second time she nearly lost him was entirely panic. His heart stopped. His heart, she always suspected he had one. And he lay dying on the floor of a bus, having dodged this experience but a day earlier. It was deja vu. It was unfortunate. Cuddy watched him collapse, knowing that he was risking his life - giving his life, to save someone else, who he didn't even know. Without a thought she fell to her knees, if he was going to die, it would be with her at his side. But she wouldn't let him die. It wasn't his choice. She couldn't lose him like this, not now. A strange thought began forming in the back of her head, but she pushed it away, brought her mouth to his and breathed life back into him. Because she was his friend. Because she needed him as much as he needed her at that moment. She saved him. It was not the first time and it will not be the last. A bus full of mock passengers were an audience to the event. All witnesses of her loyalty, her undying love for him, platonic, established, unconditional.

The third was devastating. Despair and unendurable dread. Cuddy was certain she had lost him. Suddenly she became a doctor again, stabilized him after the seizure, monitored him closely, constantly, held his hand as he slept. Her heart broke a little more every hour he was unresponsive. She talked to him in his coma, even though she doesn't really believe people can hear anything. She'd been at his bedside before, but was never as scared, about any patient, any man, anybody. She worried more than a friend does. Cared more than a boss does. Did more than a doctor does. So afraid of losing him that she couldn't leave his side. Then, the moment he opened his eyes, her mental paralysis subsided and the conclusion her mind was avoiding in the midst of fear and probity fell upon her making those eyes brim with tears and a smile steal her mouth. She loves him. Now more than ever. It took three disasters but she knows she loves him. She's always loved him, but now it's different. Having nearly lost him so many times Cuddy regrets never telling him how she feels. And more, she regrets not asking him that question, more than a year ago. Maybe a new life then would somehow balance this loss and relieve the tension of the Amber incident.

Perhaps, she made the wrong choice.

It is strange to think what might have been. Because even small choices are significant. They are dots that form a picture we can't see until the very end. We must connect them. We must plot the dots perfectly to form the picture. We must first decide what picture we want. And be cynical and perceptive enough to recognize the relationship between each dot. Wondering if she had asked that fateful, potentially life giving question if things would be any different now. Would it have been a success? Would she have triplets? Another miscarriage? Could a relationship have formed between them? Would he have even said 'yes'?

And really: Would Amber be alive right now? Chance happenings, House getting drunk that night, calling Wilson, Amber coming to get him, and most importantly, House forgetting his cane - it all seems absurd. But, this is how things happen. Cause, effect, random really. Reality is chance.

Life is chaos.

Sometime before she falls asleep, Cuddy decides, whether she realizes it or not, that she will begin the IVF again. She's healthy, more than a few years from menopause, it will always be this vacancy, this pursuit of a lost moment if she gives up entirely. She tried to push this desire aside, deny it, demote its importance, but it may be the only thing that can make her truly happy. It is something she deserves.

_**a presently pertinent past**_

When Lisa Cuddy was a little girl, she decided two things, two certainties of her life at a very young age. One was that she wanted to be doctor and the other that she wanted to be a mother. As an only child her youth was rather lonely and spent studying, writing, daydreaming. There was tennis but even that could be played versus a wall. She had friends, but at the end of the day there was no fellow youth to reflect off of. No mirror in a sibling. At six years old, little Lisa decided she wanted three children when she grew up. How she arrived at the number three was a rather complex psychological equation for a first grader. A boy and then a girl and then another boy. The desire for children as a child was really more of a longing for siblings, the alternative to being so alone. Then, she wanted a big brother and a little brother and that has never really changed. Now, Cuddy still wants a boy and a man.

Of course a husband was part of her idealized future, some prince charming, preferably a knight in shining armor who would ride in on a white stallion and sweep her off her feet. Rescue her from a world where she had only herself. A friend, a soul mate, a companion.

And she nearly got one.

Eleven years ago, before she was Dean of Medicine, Cuddy was working in the clinic at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. An English Professor from the university came in, complaining of abdominal pain and she treated him for food poisoning. A tall, dark, green eyed doctor of philosophy. His name was Richard and he did not have food poisoning. When he returned to the ER the next day, she was reprimanded for her misdiagnosis but still allowed to participate in the differential. It was not an enigma, he had a gallstone blocking the pancreatic duct, trapping digestive juices inside the pancreas and the pain was from pancreatitis. Cuddy performed the surgery, falling in love from the inside out.

As Richard recovered he flirted, she was his attending, it was in her job description to flirt back. Upon being discharged, her long awaited white knight asked Cuddy out to dinner, and for the first time since she was six, she was consumed by innocent excitement. Not at the prospect of getting naked with a sexy, ivy league PhD. But at the possibility of this being the one, an inadvertent new beginning, the contingent love at first sight.

Their first date was the kind of fairy tales. Not a single awkward beat, their chemistry shone from a mile away. It was not some formal 500 a plate affair. He took her to his favorite diner. They talked, real conversation rather than the shallow ice breaking introductory dialogue of most first dates. They had gotten to know each other while he was her patient. Cuddy had seen him naked, seen him sick, she'd seen his entrails, the ice broke then. From the moment they met he called her Lisa, always. And she loved it. Because she wasn't just a doctor in his company, she was a woman, different with him than in any other aspect of her life. She discovered new parts of herself when they were together, Richard changed her. They filled the diner with laughter until he middle of the night, a certain naivete about her giggle. They had a lot in common. Both were left handed. Both Jewish. Both doctors. And both of them were siblingless. Richard was polite, but not insincere. The tone of his voice was persuasion. She found her hand in his the entire time and Cuddy knew then, in some Jersey diner she'd never been in before and will never be in again, that he was the one, the only one. The fact that they made love that night was complete coincidence.

_**april fools**_

They dated for more than four years. Cuddy stayed in Princeton because of him, passed up more appealing job opportunities, a chance to pursue endocrinology to its fullest, to be with a man. Sacrifice has never been difficult for her.

The first of April of their fifth year together, she found a jewelry store receipt. Certain Richard was going to propose, she did not hesitate to confess she was late. Utterly ecstatic at the possibility of being pregnant, Cuddy had finally found the man she loved and everything was somehow falling into place on its own.

And then the world ended. At least briefly. Being the only one aware of a momentary apocalypse is something impossible to ever recover from completely. When she told Richard, his face got bright red with anger, white with shock and then green with nausea. He stopped breathing. Then he would only inhale between the syllables of 'Are you sure?' asking it about fifty times, as if her response might change on the forty ninth. Cuddy answered that she wasn't certain but suspected. It wasn't just panic in his face, it was disgust. It was disappointment. All of the knots they had tied were coming undone.

Later she found the jewelry store purchase was for his mother's birthday and that Richard did not want children. The woman had been misled. Four years and she thought he wanted kids the entire time, she thought they were aiming for the same goal, racing toward the same finish line, but they were not even on the same team. He was just placating her. Humoring her childhood ambition, a girlish fantasy. Four years and everybody lies. Two inaccurate home pregnancy tests after he left, she also found she wasn't pregnant. Cuddy lost Richard, not even because of a negligent act or ignorant indiscretion but mere enthusiasm. She lost the only man she would let herself love, who loved her in return. Eventually, she convinced herself it was for the better and drowned herself in medicine. Days, weeks, she never left the hospital, just buried herself deeper, endeavoring to forget, deny, and save lives all the while. Promotion after another and then she's dean. But a day hasn't gone by that she doesn't think about him. Memory is merciless. Richard symbolized her passion for being a doctor, when he left, 'M' and ''D' followed leaving an empty space that she filled with administration.

Richard was to Cuddy what Stacy was to House. So following the infarction she understood what House was going through. She knew the catastrophe, of having hope, an entire future stolen. House lost his thigh and Cuddy lost the chance at a child, at marriage, at convention and the fulfillment of what could have been the most important component of her life.

Somehow that relationship made her the happiest she's ever been, it elevated, lifted, exalted her to new heights. Gave her joy, anticipation she never knew existed. One she suspected, longed for and when she finally experienced it was even more than she imagined. Being pushed from such great heights, left her broken, suddenly and certainly aware she may never have any of the things she really wants.

That was it. There's nothing more and she'll never get it back, she'll neverhave that again.

So after years of dwelling, trying to forget, trying to not feel the pain,the frustration, she began the IVF. Stopped searching for her soul mate, certain she had already found and lost him. Reduced the hunt to donations, somebody biologically compatible on paper. House chastised her for it, convincing her how ridiculous it all was. And then as she did before, she made a horribly wrong decision. Stood silently, overcome with the profound realization that she wanted more and was incapable of attaining it. Uncertain how, where to even start.A single question but she couldn't ask it. And now she's asleep, in an empty office, completely alone.

House is home now. Out of the proverbial woods, neurologically. Recent events notwithstanding, he is also alone. She is thinking about him,worried, even in her sleep. The vigilance, the devotion, it's more than friendship, but neither will ever admit it.

Cuddy is a woman in a man's field. In a man's world. To show emotion, to reveal weakness is not in her best interest. Nobody around her understands the maternal longing. No person is here to even pretend to understand, no compassionate shoulder to cry or lean on. And now like always, she must confront and conquer it all by herself.

It is a solitary scenario, a lonesome life she has led.

As day breaks behind her, Cuddy slips out of slumber. The first few moments awake are spent uncertain where she is, but a red and gray tennis ball confirms the location. Rubbing her eyes, she stands and takes off her suit jacket in an effort to make it look as if she's not still wearing the same clothes as yesterday. Beginning the day unaware of the decision she made in her sleep, she falls into the routine of ordinary circumstances. Home is her office, it has been since she took the title. Walking to it, her stride slows when she remembers House is not here. His presence in the hospital was comforting, it was a challenge. The anxiety of having him here also brought a certain excitement. It will be boring without him.

But she won't let her mind admit she got used to him, or that he is now some integral part of PPTH (or her life). Or let her heart sink again at the thought of him never returning. Suppression of these thoughts, these feelings, is the only thing that has gotten her this far.

After dealing with a disgruntled patient in the clinic and insurance expense reports before lunch, Cuddy attends a board meeting, in the company of mostly lawyers and addressing malpractice cases of the last five years. A yawn on the return to her office, she looks around, anticipating hopefully something interesting, something rare but all she sees are the monotonous movements of patients and nurses. Nurses. One who should most definitely not be here. Cuddy had sent nurse Dickerson home with House, suspecting she would not be welcome or allowed to stay long, but also knowing that he should have somebody with him for the first 72 hours, at least. The man's head was cracked open and then electrocuted, his heart stopped, and he wasn't the picture of health to begin with. He needs somebody with him should he start bleeding or stop breathing, again.

A permanent headache did not ameliorate his disposition. Cuddy knows this.

Approaching nurse Dickerson,

"Where's House?"

"His apartment."

"What happened?"

Nurse Dickerson rolls her eyes. Then with a deadpan stare,

"What do you think happened?"

Cuddy nods, speaking almost to herself,

"He harassed, offended, abused you..."

"Don't worry, he's fine. And he's not going anywhere."

The nurse smiles and walks away.

The rest of Cuddy's workday is spent thinking about House. She considers calling him, but doesn't. If he answers she'll seem overly concerned and if he doesn't answer she _will_ be overly concerned. She wants to see him but is having difficulty justifying a visit.

Spending the night with him days earlier (although they were in separate rooms) was both satisfying and consolatory for Cuddy. It felt not just right but perfect to be sharing a space with a man. And it was abundantly amazing to be caring for someone, again. When she became an administrator and forfeited medicine, she lost the healing, the compassion, the caring that made her become a doctor in the first place. Yes, she could live vicariously through House but that pursuit, that inborn need to nurture, it returned with irresistible coercion, meaningful strength. It's overwhelming now and visiting him will only intensify it.

The choice was made, she is who she is, there is no going back. A career in medicine does not offer do-overs. Life does not promise second chances. She must avoid him, deny the nurturing need, resist her true calling.

What are the consequences if she doesn't?

_**remote control**_

Four knuckles meet one door. A door named 'B.' They meet it three times, consecutively. Several minutes pass, nobody comes. Cuddy turns the knob, the door is unlocked. Entering the apartment, she sees it's dark, no lights on, but the television is flickering with unfamiliar pictures, projecting them sharply at thirty frames per second. It's muted so she ignores it. Taking a few steps in Cuddy closes the door and purses her lips to say his name, on the inhalation, House speaks.

"Go away, I'm fine." Then,

"Haven't you tortured me enough with your flashlight and your bedpan. I mean, my bathroom is like three fee away. And I need a new couch anyway."

Cuddy grins, moves a few steps closer, the sound of her heels giving her away before her voice.

"No nurse can tolerate you."

House finally sits up, surprised and stimulated by the sound of her voice.

"What are you doing here?"

"Dealing with a difficult patient."

House turns away from her and toward the TV again, unmuting it to reveal the desperate groans and artificial gasps of hardcore pornography.

"House."

He turns the volume up. Before she moves in her swift, pissed pace, Cuddy finally looks at the television screen, squinting and tilting her head to try and understand the anatomical amalgamation and dissect the strange position of the plastic people in the movie. Then she walks to stand in front it, one hand on her hip.

"You need bed rest - and don't come back with some joke about me joining you."

She turns the TV off from where she is. House turns it back on with the remote.

"Porn is not going to make you better."

"But it'll make me _feel_ better."

Cuddy reaches for the remote but House pulls it away. She reaches for it again, but he switches hands. With a great deal of clumsiness and a certain amount ardor, they wrestle for the remote. And, for control.

Ironically and obliviously, their movements and efforts, their gasps and groans correspond to the evening's entertainment. But rather than end with an orgasm, this scene's climax will be the lightest touch. A simple touch. An honest touch.

Physical contact of any kind, in reality rather than in the movies, is deliberate and intimate. A faint caress can be flirtation, it can be foreplay,it can be fantastic for two souls who only touch the sick and dying on a regular basis. The act of sex corresponds in many scenarios between men and women, but with them it is constant.

Cuddy finally gets a hand on the remote, a strong grip and when House pulls on it again, he brings her down. She lands beside his lap, certain to avoid the right leg. They're close, but in an awkward position, her body language screaming that she doesn't want to be any closer. Hands overlap, his gripping hers for possession, invincible fingers wiggling beneath his palm. House pulls again, bringing them closer, against her will.

Faces align, heads tilt in opposite directions, he leans in as if he might kiss her and pauses. Both experience the exhilarating vertigo of proximity. And Cuddy lets go, a reaction to the distracting flutter of her stomach and raucous pounding of her heart. House's mouth moves away from hers abruptly and he turns the television back on. It's not dejection, it's a game.

As she stands, Cuddy's face passes the breadth of his chest and she makes the mistake of inhaling.

"God House, when was the last time you bathed?"

"Around the last time I shaved," he says, stroking his rather thick, graying beard.

"I'll run you a bath," turning the TV off as she passes it.

"But mom!" he whines.

Cuddy leers through the corner of her eye, the only one aware of the irony. The sound of water running concludes her determination.

She returns to the couch motioning with her head for him to go be clean. When House stands, he staggers and she squats to brace him. In lieu of a cane, he leans on her, and she loves it as much as she loves him. They traverse the short distance slowly. Standing by him, with him, supporting him, what a metaphor this short journey is.

"Where's your cane?"

"Nurse Dickerbitch took it."

House is enjoying having his arm around her, so he doesn't add 'I'm sure those were your orders.'

Cuddy is limping herself under his weight and falters, his body leaning into hers, he bites his tongue, his cheek scratching hers.

"Sorry."

House nods as they arrive, completely depressed at the dismally long duration it took to get them here. Limping in on his own, he tugs at his tee shirt,

"Care to join me?"

As he takes it off, she turns away smirking.

"Are you going to be okay here by yourself?"

"I'll make sure to wash behind my ears."

Cuddy turns her head back a little to see him fumbling with the button of his jeans and reaches in to pull the door shut.

Then she stops, captivated by how childlike he looks slouching in this bathroom, a pile of clothes at his feet, a certain innocence in his pure blue eyes. House is a victim. Of himself, yes. But of something more, something she can't identify. There have been many times when she recognized this in him and considered what an adorable kid he must of been.

Or, what a beautiful baby he could make.

"I'm going to submit a patient care complaint if you don't get in here and give me a sponge bath. Preferably without a bra."

Cuddy starts walking away.

"Preferably without _any_ clothes."

The door named B shuts. She's gone.

Pulling into her driveway, Cuddy sits a long time and stares at her garage door. Her mind is convoluted with choices she's made and plagued by the promise of making more. Restless, uncertain, and irritated by her unease, she reluctantly goes inside.

The moment her feet cross the threshold a mental monologue commences,the purpose of which is to convince herself she'd rather be alone. That she likes living this way. Single life has benefits, it's liberating to be so independent. But this large and empty space taunts her and she resolves to take a bath - an activity everybody does unaccompanied, it will make the context on her consciousness less desolate.

And, it is a safe subliminal way of taking one with him. Indirectly confirming her desire to both be with House and to not be by herself, anymore. The tub is more than spacious, it's probably bigger than her garage, she thinks, she could easily park her Mercedes in here. Cuddy strips slowly, dropping her clothes piece by piece and scrutinizingthe naked body in the mirror, as if she is staring at more than flesh, trying to see her soul, lure it to the surface from deep within. But it does not come this time. The pale skin and toned muscle of this image is mocking her. And she is saddened by the possibility of no man ever really appreciating any of it, any of her. The room fills slowly with thick billows of gray steam, obscuring all ridiculing reflections, and she gets in the tub, determined to wash away her pessimism and indecision.

The heat of the water melts the ivory shade of her body away. Replacing it with a gorgeous warmth, a pink tint. As her skin undergoes an alteration in color until it is alien, unrecognizable, so does her perspective. At least it begins to, gradually. She acknowledges her decision to restart the IVF (and to ask her diagnostician to contribute). Is admitting the possibility of _feeling _for House. And finally realizing that everything that has happened, all of the change, may not be bad. Lathering the length of her arms now, in an almost optimistic digression - House is different . Softer, irreparably damaged, burdened by a heaviness, a weight, a guilt she once carried. He knows his arrogance, his selfishness killed someone. He knows he messed up and that it may have cost him his best friend. But he's taking responsibility for it, he's being an adult for a change. And there is something attractive to Cuddy about this transformation, this maturation. A year ago she nearly fell for it. Greg House the grown up is far more difficult to resist. Turning the taps with her toes, a sigh echoes off of the porcelain and tile. A sound symptomatic of the decision to resign resistance.

The right choice, at last.


	2. Love and Sleep

Part 2/9

II. Love and Sleep

The term _in vitro_, from the Latin root meaning 'in glass', is used because early biological experiments involving cultivation of tissues outside the living organism from which they came, were carried out in glass containers such as beakers, test tubes, or petri dishes. Today, the term _in vitro_ is used to refer to any biological procedure that is performed outside the organism it would normally be occurring in, to distinguish it from an_ in vivo_ procedure, where the tissue remains inside the living organism within which it is normally found. Initially in vitro fertilization was developed to overcome infertility due to problems with the fallopian tube, but it turned out that it was successful in many other infertility situations as well. Hence its contemporary popularity.

Lisa Cuddy, Dean of Medicine, endocrinologist, aspiring matriarch wants a less clinical conception. She also wants to be a doctor rather than an administrator, to have a husband in bed beside her late at night when the floor boards creak, and a time machine so that she can go back and rewrite her life's story.

But you can't always get what you want. And even if she could could, she would run from it.

Cuddy actually cringes at the thought of restarting the IVF. Three cycles of it convinced her that it wasn't worth it. And now as she's trying to persuade herself to begin again, she feels guilty assigning a value, a limit to the life that could have been. How could she think it wasn't 'worth' it?

Desperation drove her to the dehumanizing process. And now the thought of repeating it - being stretched open, scraped out, stuffed full of cold metal, pumped full of air, injected with dye and hormones and drugs of all sorts, is evoking hesitation, to say the least. Having her most intimate self poked, prodded, probed, and generally manipulated in another series of procedures will not be easy. But it's not the process of conceiving the child that isn't 'worth' it, it's the trials, the vain attempts, the final failure, confirming her infertility, that is useless and lamentable. If it all succeeds, it's priceless.

But really, it wasn't the money or the time or the bodily infringement that made the entire episode unbearable. It was the fact that she was left doing it all completely alone. Through the entire violating insemination process an endless stream of tears married silent sobs every second she knew nobody was looking. All she could think about was Richard. Each time she wanted nothing more than somebody to hold her hand, some sort of encouragement. Wishing for a husband, somebody to make love to her, rescue her from the unnatural situation. Somebody in the waiting room for reassurance. Anybody to comfort her and say she was brave, independent, doing the right thing. But each time all she had was a sterile room and some strange doctor on her payroll touching her, offering only his hypocritical bedside manner.

And her heartfelt longing for a child.

Whatever the outcome, Cuddy was determined to remain an emotionally functional woman. But she failed miserably. Became detached, spending all of her energy in the war against infertility. She tried red clover, she tried hormones, she tried acupuncture and every gimmick she could afford. She even prayed, begging God for the chance, the opportunity to prove herself as an acceptable mother. The prayer was actually answered, for a short time Lisa Cuddy _was_ pregnant.

The most disturbing aspect of it all she decided, out of the many before her,was the one she didn't have the audacity to do anything about. The anonymity of the donor. Granted, Cuddy knew that pregnancy wasn't some magical, romantic rarity that only happened to starcrossed lovers. But, she did dread the process of looking through cryogenic banks and trying to choose promising semen based on letters and numbers, ink on a page.

She considered Wilson, a friend, a doctor, but he was fickle. A few failed marriages, and he couldn't even handle Hector. Then she considered House, and before she could ask him, he made her realize she wanted more. Made her even more disgusted at the prospect of some nameless, illogically (genetically) suitable man's remnants of a five knuckle shuffle being thawed, thrown into a petri dish and forced to make friends with her ova.

It made her feel undesired, foolish. Wasn't there any sperm out there that _wanted_ to take her egg out to a movie?

The miscarriage broke her. House telling her what a bad mother she would be shattered the remains of the illusion. She believed it and stopped. House was right, he's always right.

What she did not know, and still doesn't suspect, is that House's hostility at the time was rooted in his disappointment in not being asked. Even he may not have realized the envy, the bitter blighted hope he was a victim of and directing at her.

_**algernon charles swinburne**_

Today at work, Cuddy arrives so absently and so quickly that she half believes she slept here again last night. With the few moments she has to herself, she sits behind her desk, feigning administration, looking out into the clinic, and trying to direct her thoughts away from the trepidation she's feeling about asking the fateful question, tonight.

The moment she removes House from her mind, Richard replaces him.

One day in the span of time that Cuddy believed Richard wanted kids, they were comparing their experiences growing up as only children. Richard said that _when_ he has children, he wants more than one, perhaps even twins, because he would never want to curse some little life with the boredom and loneliness of having only them- its parents.

At that point Cuddy took the opposing stance, the alternate perspective adopting it for the moment, as her own. She said that one child may not be a curse. They could afford to spoil it, send it to college, shower it with attention. One child may suffice, it may be enough _when the day comes. _One, she realized through this argument, would make her happy. And was defending her right to stop at one. More would be greedy, it would also be a struggle.

One is all she really wants.

Richard did not disagree with her anymore and they rarely discussed children after that except at social gatherings where they could openly critique the parenting practices of their friends.

They had a dog. A saint bernard named Swinburne. It was obviously Richard's, only an English professor would name a canine after a poet. Richard loved that dog, and although in a completely different way, he loved him more than he loved Cuddy. Swinburne would be waiting by his bedside every morning, with his leash in his mouth. He would jump up and lick his face the moment Richard stepped through the door, every evening when he returned from work. Cuddy didn't hate the dog, but she wasn't willing to compete for his affection. So, she didn't really like the mutt either. But it was mutual, Swinburne often growled, howled, and barked at her, especially when she was wearing her lab coat.

One day, Richard noticed an abscess, a bump on Swinburne's hind leg. Immediately, he took him to the vet, and after a week of tests, confirmed cancer. Richard tried all veterinary treatments to slow the progress, remove as much of it as possible. Canine oncology bills accrued, but he didn't care. Despite all efforts, Swinburne fell ill and died within months, quietly at Richard's bedside, with the leash in his mouth.

This marked the beginning of the end for Richard and Cuddy. He had no hope, no understanding for doctors anymore. Veterinary technology, science had failed him, and he took it out on her. She did after all, embody a philosophy founded on medicine.

Seeing Richard lose that dog broke Cuddy's heart, he fell out of love with his work, with literature, poetry, with life. He stopped shaving, grew a beard reminiscent of Rasputin, and withdrew from the world. Eventually, Cuddy suggested they adopt a new animal, but Richard wouldn't have it, Swinburne was with him for ten years, he could not be replaced. Cuddy kept trying to soothe his wounded spirit. But she didn't understand how any grown man could be so affected by the loss of an animal. She understood grieving, but depression, mourning to this extent, seemed ridiculous. She witnessed _humans, _people with mortgages, careers, children of their own, dying and suffering everyday for years. An animal seemed so insignificant.

Then Cuddy had an epiphany. That Swinburne was not just a pet to Richard, he was a son. And Richard was only doing what he thought a father should do after experiencing such a loss, he wasn't weak or insane, and he didn't need a new dog. He needed a child, he needed to refill that paternal vacancy.

Cuddy comforted him, cajoled him, went to therapy with him and most importantly got off birth control. For him. Richard healed, as he had in her hands before. And every night that they made love she considered it a favor for him, one she hoped ricocheted and made her maternal dream reality.

Success seemed imminent. As did marriage. But both were denied her, and now Cuddy decides House is more worthy of a space in her anxiety ridden consciousness than Richard. So, he returns.

_**all the world's a stage**_

Standing in her office, Cuddy closes all of the blinds, for both privacy and concentration as she starts to formulate the question that may change both of their lives and create another. She knows she will take him his cane tonight, make amends for having nurse Dickerson steal it. The cane will be a segway, a legitimate excuse for being there, again.

It will have to be approached from a clearly clinical viewpoint. They won't be people, they will be cells and fluid, pronuclei and unromantic incubation. They are doctors, they know the details. But still, he will undoubtedly come back with the essential, "You want me to masturbate in the hospital? Don't you think I jerk off enough here already?" Levity in the midst of the heaviest question. One she doesn't expect an answer to tonight. Cuddy definitely wants him to think about it. They'll have to discuss privacy, she doesn't want anybody knowing, especially before it's (if) a success. He kept her secret before though, trust is not an issue. Rejection is. The thought of him saying 'no' has tormented her since the first honest moment she considered House an option. They will have to discuss their roles. As if suddenly they are leads in the cast of a play that begins with pregnancy, and ends, well, when does it end? That's what they must decide, and they have no scripts to suggest dialogue and no director telling them how they should interpret each scene. They must improvise, and this precarious improvisation begins tonight.

Now, Lisa Cuddy must become a playwright. She must find words, inject meaning and assign punctuation. The question mark is the most difficult, yes. The first line of her play will read:

"House..."

Then there will be a beat, one of about a hundred in this scene, but they are actors now, they can handle it.

"I'm going to be starting the IVF again, soon."

He will interject with something about hormone shots, her huge ass, and a turkey baster.

"I was wondering if..."

If, oh if. Two letters with the ability to taunt her more than the rest of the alphabet.

"If you would consider being a donor."

Finally, expelled, and there's not even a question mark.

"Before you seemed like you were interested..."

No, don't say that, it's implying that he might have changed his mind. Don't even entertain the possibility. Stay in the present, not the past.

"If not, that's okay. Please think about it. You have time."

Does he? Does anybody? Why ask this now? The man recently had a trio of near-death experiences. Let him heal. Let his scrotum recover before its given such a tremendous demand.

But.

If Cuddy doesn't ask him now, she may never. So as ridiculous and desperate and assailable as she feels approaching him with such an outrageous proposition, she must. And she must do it tonight.

There is no other choice, she can't escape the desire for a baby and doesn't want a faceless stranger helping her make one.

The creation of life is exhilarating and overwhelming even when it is theoretical.

The rest of the day is spent behind shaded blinds chewing nails and worrying her lip. Cuddy doesn't understand why she's so intimidated by a question. Except it's not the question that bothers her, it's who she's asking, it's the answer, and the consequences of 'yes' or 'no'.

Suddenly anxious and impelled, her heart a little arrhythmic, Cuddy stands, hurrying out of her office and the clinic, with only a cane, leaving the hospital and her unfinished stage play as far behind as possible.

_**act one**_

By the time she finds the courage to turn down his street, it is dusk. A mild and hopeful early May evening. Spring is in the air, circulating through her lungs with a lot of fear and very little faith.

Even her knock is nervous.

House goes to the door rather than hollering, although it isn't locked. The wait makes her sweat, her face paler than ever when the door finally opens. He gives her an expectant glare, not entirely insincere, and opens the door wider, leaning heavy on the knob. Cuddy goes to say something but raises the cane instead and walks in.

Seeing House, limping, his fractured head and the thinning, grayish hair on it, almost makes her forget tonight's agenda. She is consumed again by gratitude for his survival. The grace of his life. The man himself is not as appreciative. Cuddy is flush with the pleasure of his presence, struggling to suppress it, speechless.

"That my cane?"

She nods, adding a long blink, ending a mesmeric stare.

House takes it from her hand, tips of fingers touching, bringing this scene to life. Suddenly it is all very real. He is here, she is here, something has to happen.

Cuddy cannot be defeated by involuntary silence tonight. Not again.

Say something, say anything.

"You smell better."

_Okay_.

House turns around, she's avoiding eye contact.

"Are you coming on to me?"

Cuddy's blushing, the tension is easing up, moment by moment.

"How are you feeling?"

"Not as good as I smell, apparently."

"How's your h-"

"My head's fine."

"Any mo-"

"Motor function, memory, it's all good. Every dismal detail of my miserable life. Didn't lose any of it."

House is anticipating everything, perhaps he might already know the question.

Maybe she won't even have to say it.

"Have you heard from Wilson?"

Cuddy deals with the change of subject,

"No."

Then,

"He took some time off. But he didn't leave a number with the hospital or anything.

It's a lie. Both know Wilson left a number and a location and instructions to not tell House either. He nods anyway.

Cuddy stands mute and motionless for minutes, unsure how to transition from Wilson to her empty uterus.

"Well, if you're just going to stand there, I'm going to bed."

And House starts toward his room. Cuddy follows, finding the words as soon as he's out of sight. Behind him now, past the barrier doorway of the bedroom, the sentence forms in her mind. But he turns around, his look erasing every letter. Eyes fix to eyes for an eternity, House waiting for her to say something, explain why she followed him.

"Is there something else?"

A rather appropriate yet haphazard inquiry, Cuddy thinks.

'The truth, say the truth, he asked, just answer.'

"I was wondering..."

Good. Progress, now be honest.

"When you were planning on returning to work."

Damn, so close.

House raises his eyebrows, knowing it is a lie, and curious why she's choosing to lie now, to him.

"Four, six weeks. At least."

"Okay."

Cuddy nods, looking over his shoulder, at the bed.

"I'll take eight if you let me."

"Whatever you need."

A certain self disdain in her voice, knowing the question will not be asked tonight, hating her procrastination. Hating herself, this cowardice. It's too late, they're in his bedroom for God's sake. She can't ask it here, not now. She has to rewrite the scene, the entire first act, spontaneously, with little inspiration- _now_.

House can tell something is troubling her, that Cuddy is not herself. More uneasy than she usually is with him, he tries to be nice,

"Thank -"

Before he can say 'you,' her lips are on top of his. The shape of their mouths meeting. Soft, warm, a kiss but barely. The happiness of having him before her, of House somehow still being alive and with her at this moment comes rushing forth. Cuddy tries to say as much but this is all she can make happen.

It is a word, without sound. A platonic expression of gratitude, an exchange between friends, not a sensual initiation or a romantic gesture. A confession of her fear of ever losing him, and a promise to never be abandoned again.

Closed mouths, lips touching it is still enough to taste a hint of each other. House is uncertain it's her who's kissing him. Reality has been a delusion lately. Unreality an increasing lot. It is abrupt and unexpected but when he opens his eyes she's standing there looking up at him. It's definitely Lisa Cuddy, with a strange combination of pain, regret, and inexplicable joy in her eyes. A hand is high on his back, behind his heart, admiring its resilience. When he goes to open his mouth, to deepen this kiss, to breathe, extend the moment, she pulls back, ending the connection.

Cuddy looks at him, and then her eyes change direction. She's suddenly aware of how blue the room is and that it's night now. Their latent shadows coupling in the darkness, neither uncomfortable nor embarrassed. It felt good. There it is, she's _feeling_ something again. And turns away, not speaking because it was both a good bye kiss and the last word. Time to go and her feet begin leading her back to loneliness.

"Stay."

He requests without considering.

It is more than an invitation but not an attempt at seduction.

It is House's first compassionate deed. He is transcending his selfishness, he is being a friend, he is offering her company. He wants to say more, to find out what's bothering her, why she's really here, but he just sits down on the bed, looking up at her with that boyish expression, as if it's the first day of school and he's trying to make a new friend.

Unwilling to leave before intermission, she sits beside him. They are at the bottom of the bed, feet swinging above the floor, pretending it's all perfectly normal. Starlight through a window and the solace of silence. A fleeting stretch of time and then House lies back and Cuddy lands beside him. They stare side by side at the ceiling, the reflection of traffic lights painting the room with the colors of 'stop' and 'go' a few times before a voice breaks through.

"What's wrong?"

Cuddy shakes her head, blinking away tears. Knowing a sob would escape if her lips parted even a little. It is still an answer.

After a few minutes House reaches a hand out and takes hold of one of hers. It is supple and trembling and precious in his grasp. Cuddy falls asleep like this, holding on to only him, both refusing to let go. He doesn't want to fall asleep, convinced that if he examines her long enough he might see the origin of her anxiety rise to the surface. See her struggle and be able to share it, reduce it, end it.

He wants to kiss her again. Affection has become foreign to him, the last woman he felt like this with was Stacy, a married Stacy, and it seems so long ago.

Looking at her, it's perfect, the gaze, the woman, the fact that she's in his bed. It's satisfying to see her asleep. Sex and sleeping together are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love first makes itself felt in the desire for shared sleep, not the desire to copulate. The ability to sleep soundly with someone is monumental. It involves trust, comfort, and to want it is a new level of intimacy. And he wants it.

Both need it.

House yawns, eyelids heavy, still wanting to kiss her. A sleeping beauty kind of kiss, but he is no valiant prince. Really, he wants to wrap his arms around her, to hold her close and whisper whatever she needs to hear into her ear until she's completely cured. But he's afraid of waking or offending her, of losing the warmth, the body next to him. So he relaxes at her side, appreciating the space she's filling, strokes the top of her hand with his thumb and falls asleep.

They never touch more than limbs the entire night.


	3. Soul and Body

Part 3/9

III. Soul and Body

The morning sun casts hard shadows on the truth. House wakes empty handed, on the conclusion of a bad dream he forgets the moment his eyes open. Alone in bed, a hand reaches out finding only a pile of sheets beside him. His head sinks into the pillow at the thought that she left him in the middle of the night, the way she did once before. As he inhales to sigh he lifts his head, hearing a clamorous noise from his kitchen.

Then a waft of Cuddy's constancy drifts in. It is bacon and cinnamon and the smell of burnt toast. House smiles to himself, the first feeling of elementary delight since the accident. Then he takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, trying to hold on to this adventitious vision of domestic ordinarity.

Hunger and thirst, two separate, different and equal desires are not unlike sex and sleep. They are cravings, necessities for being well, being human, being happy.

For just being.

So he stumbles forth, into his kitchen wide awake and wanting it all.

_**everything is illuminated**_

Natural daylight consists of both skylight and sunlight. It varies based on atmospheric conditions, altitude, location, time of year, and hour of the day. Today the entire sky is a source of illumination, in many ways. It is perfect light, somehow all the factors are congruous, determining to make this the most beautiful number on the calendar.

A ray of this rare balance is beaming through a window at a eloquent angle, making Lisa Cuddy photographically brilliant. Establishing an immaculate aesthetic for this portrait, thispicturesque glimpse into her soul. She is standing at the counter, pouring coffee, her back to House as he walks in.

The light respects her, diffusing flaws, enhancing elegance. His brooding melancholy begins to evaporate, watching this woman make breakfast.

'It's so simple,' he thinks. Uncertain why this mundane voyeurism is rousing emotion. House takes a step closer, directly behind her but Cuddy is in her own world and doesn't know he's there. Turning around, nearly walking into him, startled by the presence of his stationary body,

"Jesus," spilling coffee.

"You're a Jew."

"Sit down, I made breakfast."

He obeys, she follows with a plate of food. The bacon is turkey, dry and shriveled. The toast is more burnt than it smells, and a bowl of oatmeal with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top is reminiscent of what must be traveling through his large intestine at the moment.

There were clearly no cooking classes offered at Michigan.

House's mind floods with insults but he sees Cuddy's forehead glazed with sweat and knows she worked to do this. She tried, for him. So he picks up a piece of bacon and chews on it. And chews on it. And chews on it some more.

"Delicious."

She shoots him a look that deflects the sarcasm, poking the oatmeal with a spoon.

"Do you do this for all your patients? Or just the ones you're trying to seduce? I'm not sure my insurance will cover the homemaker fantasy.

I have always had a crush on Betty Crocker though."

"I'm just doing what nurse would do."

It's a lie. House smiles, reciting his mantra to himself. Knowing she is in fact doing what a wife would do.

Nothing's funny but he almost laughs, his body's reaction to seeing her shine under this new domesticated light.

"Are you planning on moving in for the next eight weeks?

Because I could use a maid."

"I'm not here to do your laundry, I'm here to make sure you don't swallow your tongue if you have another seizure."

She takes a bite of the oatmeal and spits it back out.

"Four weeks," she corrects him.

"But you said-"

"A month is long enough for you to recover."

"Six."

"This isn't a negotiation. If you're fine at the end of four, you're coming back."

House rolls his eyes and moves his lips, imitating her as she says it. She's the boss.

Under the table he kicks her, resting his foot on hers a few seconds longer than is hostile. Toes twiddle toes. Cuddy bows her head, trying to disguise her girlish grin.

And succeeding,

"I have to go."

Work, yes work. And a few more acts need written, the question still needs asked.

Standing, she sees him playing with his food and the flame of her heart flickers again with the thought of what Greg House's child might be like.

"Call the hospital if you change your mind about a nurse."

House nods, the lightest hold on his shoulder as she passes and leaves. He considers asking if she's coming back, but knows the futility of anticipation, of expectation, of hope.

They slept together, they actually slept. Together.

Being with her made his insomnia subside. And after he recognizes this, House realizes she kissed him. _She_ kissed _him_. It took a while to distinguish. He also realizes he spent the entire night wanting to kiss her again. It is unusual, normally he's fixated on her cleavage or her ass or some fantastic striptease. But having again experienced true affection, a simple kiss, this is all he longs for. More than sex, more than the tantalizing removal of her clothes, more than anything. (Of course he wouldn't pass up the opportunity to get naked and sweaty and coital with her, he is a man, warm blood is still pumping through his veins.) It is the intimacy though, the honesty that he wants to recreate. House is finally beginning to admit that he doesn't want to be alone anymore, either.

_**a brief introduction of genes**_

At the hospital Cuddy cannot stop thinking about the details of Gregory House's theoretical offspring. What characteristics would he or she possess? Which of their attributes would they inherit? What would nature's outcome be if dean and diagnostician combined, successfully?

Would he be tall and abrasive like House? Or detail and control oriented like Cuddy? Would she excel in her chosen career, go to medical school like both of her parents, or become an actress, a dancer, an accountant? Really, would he or she have ten fingers and ten toes, survive nine months, be healthy, be born?

This is the issue her mind dwells upon. So much can go wrong through the processes of conception and pregnancy. As a doctor, she unfortunately knows the extent of problems that are not only possible but likely. The disheartening details can be discouraging, but for now she blocks them. Visualizing vividly the face of a son or daughter, a person to create a legacy so that part of Lisa Cuddy (and Greg House) might live on for generations.

When the donor was anonymous, she knew he at least had healthy sperm. It was tested and retested for infectious diseases, genetic disorders, flaws of any kind, the entire biological history laid before her.

Now, Cuddy is afraid that if she does ask House and he does agree to do it, that they might make it to the point of having expectations, of wanting it and find something wrong with him, genetically. That they may go through all of this, leave their bleeding broken hearts unguarded, and the sperm may not be viable. It will sit around in the lab for years until somebody finds it and looks at it and he convinces them that rather than having syphilis, he is a eunuch.

It would be the greatest disappointment, to know he is willing but unable. The sperm tests are stringent, they will undoubtedly find _something_ wrong with him. Something common like Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, could disqualify, _him_, her final and right choice. The picture she sees of their child's smile might never be real.

The thought makes her sick, an empty stomach churning, Cuddy tries to think of something else.

For an instant Richard reappears. She wonders where he is now, what has become of him. But a rumble in her belly makes the pregnancy question return. Trying to imagine what it must feel like to have a baby kicking, moving, growing inside of her, she has been distracting herself away from the faint possibility of it being a success. She knows the odds are against her, that there are more obstacles than miracles in medicine. All she really has in her head (and heart) is an overwhelming longing for a child.

Cuddy's mind is just beginning to venture past this singular goal.

If she has House's baby, how are they going to handle it? Spending the night with him again is making her reassess the answer. Being a single parent is something she prepared herself for and she hasn't really considered House as a father. The man's so immature sometimes she doesn't know if it will fit, he's certainly not typecast for it.

They will have to discuss what they both want. Now she must make a decision, does she want to be with him? Will she ask him out to dinner, approach it as a romantic possibility? Do they really have anybody other than each other anyway? They will be parents, with, for, because of each other, regardless. Marriage seems ridiculous, but they could attempt a relationship. Date. See where it leads. They may have nine months to fall in love.

Or to decide to settle.

It is all absurdly complicated and giving her a migraine. Nothing may come of it at all. The relationship, the hope, the entire scenario may be as infertile as anything. So Cuddy works, as she always has through it, past it, with it. Until the day is over.

_**nicotine**_

As she heads for her car, Cuddy shuffles through a circle of smokers outside the hospital doors, getting two lungs full of carcinogens. Coughing, she is reminded of something bythat offensive odor of cigarettes.

Richard began smoking after Swinburne died. Two, three packs a day. Cuddy hated it. In the summer she opened windows and in the winter, it was freezing, because she still the opened windows. He knew they were bad for him, that he had no real reason for wasting his money, straining his breathing, risking disease.

It was a vice, a flaw, an imperfection. One she couldn't stand really. Now, as she blows away the gray streak stalking her, Cuddy realizes that her love for Richard was conditional. That she loved him more before he smoked, that maybe by never accepting his habit, she didn't love him completely.

Or, at all.

It is strangely disconcerting and rather comforting, as she puts her car into drive. Disconcerting because until today, she had always thought she was in love with him. And a pack of marlboros made her realize she wasn't. Comforting because she is now relieved of the anguish she felt thinking she loved Richard and knowing he never really loved her the same way.

A gang of chain smokers has given Lisa Cuddy liberation, after eleven years in the waiting room.

Cuddy is homeward bound, watching the sunset reflect off of her windows when she arrives. Just as she puts her car into park, there's a shriek, one that can only be produced by the vocal chords of an infant.

A neighbor and his wife are putting their baby girl in a car seat, accidentally waking her in the process. The wail echoes down the suburban street and Cuddy tries not to stare at the inexperienced parents frustrated, exasperated, exhausted. They seem so tired she suspects they would trade the kid for a week away from here.

And as she goes to take the key out of the ignition, Cuddy experiences the most fervent envy. Seeing any new mother fills her simultaneously with exaltation and despair. Here, it's the most unbearable it's ever been. Before the couple successfully strap their baby in, Cuddy is gone, decisively driving for 221B and talking out loud, making the hardest question heard.

_**a dance in the dark**_

When House opens the door he is not wearing a shirt. Cuddy patiently stands in the hallway while he puts one on. It's backwards, and he takes it off, fumbling, juvenile, flawless again before her.

The right choice, it is the right choice.

When he's dressed, House walks away, leaving the door open, and traversing toward his piano. The first notes of "Heart and Soul" seem as if they precede his fingers touching the keys.

"I hope you brought your maid uniform this time. It's just not role playing without the props."

Ignoring him, she steps in, staying a safe distance away from the piano and the boyish man himself.

"Are you here to poison me with another one of your culinary concoctions?"

Suddenly and self pitying, "Heart and Soul" segues into "Behind Blue Eyes."

"I..." She starts.

"Came back to tell me I start work in _two_ weeks?

Tomorrow?"

Despite her rehearsal on the way here, Cuddy can't remember the lines.

"I'm sorry."

He stops playing and stands, limping toward her.

"Sorry? For what?"

'For being so scared, through it all. And for this:'

"You can take eight weeks if you need it."

"Is this some kind of trick? I come back later but you stick me with an extra eight weeks of clinic?"

"No. Take however long you need. You're entitled to it.

I understand you have a lot to deal with. You need time."

Compromise, giving him what he wants so that maybe, just maybe, she'll get what she wants.

"If you need to talk..."

Cuddy sighs and blinks, suppressing all emotion.

"If you need anything-

I'm here."

House looks at her, uncertain about everything except the frailty he's choosing to expose. Something she hasn't seen since the infarction. Since the last time she made the right choice.

His lips move, and a noise escapes, but it's not exactly a word. Suddenly House realizes that all his life he has done nothing but talk, write, search for formulas and amend them, so in the end no words are precise, all content is lost. Words are useless. They're his insomnia, his illness. And all he yearns for at the moment, vaguely but with all his might, is unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant happy, all encompassing song, overpowering once and for all, the futility,the vanity of speech. The piano is more than an instrument, it is a cure, it remedies more than the vicodin ever will. Music is the negation of sentences, it is the anti-word, a different language. He wants nothing more than another kiss from Cuddy, another chance to share this song and never speak again, just to fuse together with the thrilling thunder of music.

They take a few steps toward each other meeting in the dim and narrow hallway outside the bedroom. And then her arms are around him, it is a hug, a necessary nearness. House's head hangs on her shoulder, her face pressed to his neck feeling his pulse against her cheekbone. Her arms are tight, clasping, enfolding around him. As a natural reflex, his wrap around her, slowly, first one and then the other. A broad forearm around her waist, each of his fingers smoothing the small of her back, the movement of his chest against hers as he breathes. It's a turning point, a culmination of everything unsaid, the substantiation of silent virtue. A haze of tears mists Cuddy's eyes, at the joy of being here, of holding him like this, a blissful drop runs down her cheek. With such sweet vantage, there's no will to resist.Their strength is all a broken crutch, their hearts prisoners as they touch, two seraphic, soft fists forming behind each perseverant organ.

They sway. It is a most sincere embrace, a remedy for the emptiness she can't escape and the guilt, the suffering he will always have.

It's going to end here, she reminds herself. The muscles of his back tense when they disconnect. But her feet are fixed, heavy, refusing to budge, she can't turn away from him.

Cuddy's head tilts up, sad sapphires ascending to say goodbye. An unyielding stare, not provocative or flirtatious, but interrogative.

House has no idea what she's asking, but his eyes answer 'yes' unconditionally. Then her arms are around him again, their mouths gently meeting, delicate and tepid. Wounded hearts, sore and separate recover, reunite - the kiss is a smile. The gleam of a future glides before them, eyes closed they see it, light love in everlasting opacity. Wanting to confess this love, all she has are her lips against his, words unspoken in the spaces between their teeth, a dialogue of taste, touch, senses unrestrained.

The kiss transforms, it develops, magnifying by the minute. Mouths open, tongues tangle. Cuddy's kissing as if his is a concealed weapon, a bomb she must defuse. Yellow, red, green wires she must find, deactivate. It's as if _lives_ are at stake. Precision until she finds the detonator, but it's no use, just standing here is explosive, they're generating a heat, an energy- shockwaves can be felt from miles away.

The platonic has just become atomic.

A pale hand brushes through House's hair, resting on the back of his head, bringing their faces closer, her eyes open to see his closed, eyelashes quivering, raw susceptibility. A tangible reality before them, foreheads together, when he looks at her. Cuddy covets his eyes, wanting nothing more than to disappear into the endlessness of blue, to scream the honest truth. To not lose this, or him, ever.

Passion is resurrected, a kind they knew only once before, Cuddy pushes him up against a wall, a finger tickling his earlobe. Regaining control he staggers, forcing her up against the other wall, the hallway is suddenly an arena for this tug of war, for control, for possession.

Except it's not a fight, it's a dance. As they tango into his ballroom bedroom, they become Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, partners with unchoreographed communication, neither one leading, neither one following. A rhythmic equality, a pattern in the understanding of what is about to happen, of what _is_ happening. Waltzing backwards, House trips on his bed, landing at the bottom of it. Cuddy's standing still before him, suddenly shy.

Knowing it's timidity and not doubt, his hands reach out and take both of hers. He kisses the palm and wrist of one, his mouth trailing up the long lithe arm. When the other hand caresses his face, he moves to it, undoing a few buttons at the bottom of her blouse and looking up at her. His beard grazes her stomach as he reveals and kisses it. The blouse falls from her body like a feather in the wind while his nose rests on a hip.One of their hands unzips the skirt and she relaxes into his lap.

Planting kisses on his chin, temple, upper lip, her fists are full of his tee shirt, tugging it off of him slowly. The moment it's gone his mouth is on her, his arms even tighter knowing she is all he has left to hold onto in this world.

A gaze, both finally find what they've been so afraid to look for. House sees the immense pain behind her eyes and has another pang of compassion. He can't look at her because it hurts. He can block his own pain with pills, alcohol, hookers, but hers he can't turn away from, he feels compelled to cure.

He kisses her neck, trying to speak into it, wanting to say whatever she wants to hear, whatever would make her feel better. His legs are straining surprisingly little under her, the left one subtly moving between both of hers. Cuddy grinds closer to him, wetness against the denim. They kiss like teenagers stealing a few moments between classes. Equal amounts of fear and fascination, impulse and need, strength and weakness, lightness and weight.

Guilt and innocence.

_**before dawn**_

When they are still limbs and feet and clothes, struggles of his legs and back, of her throat and breasts, House's transient virility fades, and they fall back on the bed, her head landing on the center of his chest. Feeling him breathe into her hair, Cuddy for the briefest moment, hears the rapid pounding echoes of his life, of the man. And she's not counting, no, because she realizes it's something more, more than his pulse, more than he knows.

Centuries ago, when man would listen in amazement to regular beats in his chest, he never suspected what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage and inside that cage was something that looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body was accounted for, was the soul.

Ever since man gave each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. Doctors know that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, it has become merely an obsolete prejudice.

But as she hears this triumphant drumming, falling in love with it, with him, the romantic unity of body and soul eclipses everything she knows about medicine. And Lisa Cuddy is no longer a doctor, she is a woman again.

A woman whose dormant soul is trying to awaken, rise, be felt, unite with another.

But Cuddy's soul is not her heart. No, it is her womb.Empty and infertile as it may be. Her soul has been longing for release, for fulfillment,for everything her career has denied it. She must abandon science, logic, the quantitative weights of medicine and administration. Weights on a scale she's been trying to balance for years. She must tip these impossible scales, or at least try.

So when her ear rises from his chest, House thinks it's over. That what he's been doing isn't enough, that by falling back he has failed her. Then she kisses his neck, his lips, his eyes, a hand caresses his face and she smiles, a smile as if the two of them together managed to get rid of all the trouble in the world and are now at peace in their own heaven.

Long imprisoned bliss is emancipated as they lay prostrate in each other's arms, reveling in the unadulterated beauty of darkness. House tries to hold her longer but she breaks free, kissing his chin, his shoulders and chest. They become shadows drowning in midnight, everything is happening at a speed slower than reality. They are taking their time, because they know this may never happen again, because they have an overwhelming and inexplicable need to make it perfect, because there's nothing else they'd rather be doing.

Each movement improved. Each feature refined.

Until they are naked,in the middle of a tender night, a spring night, a remarkably unrepeatable night- and nowhere else.

They kiss, moan, gasp in his bed, continuing this dance that began, years ago, really. But there is no routine to be rehearsed. No choreography, they don't know what happens next. They're not performing, they're meditating.

Sustaining essential eye contact, Cuddy takes soft, deep breaths, gazing beyond his eyes and into some dream, overwhelmed with happiness and a strange sense of relief. The dream is coming true. Her face has changed with his looking up at it; there is eternal oonlight in it. A finger coerces her face down and he kisses her forehead.

"I love you," she says against his shoulder, just lips moving, without any sound, but a sincere declaration no less.

When he penetrates her, Cuddy watches him, knowing it could be more, that they could make it more, not knowing it already is more.

This physical connection is the first in a self-amplifying series of events. The first link in a chain reaction, the first domino tipping in an endless row, the first nub and void of a puzzle being pieced together.

Consciousness is expanding, polarities combining, it's not lust and it's more than love.

This isn't sex. Orgasm is not the purpose for this impromptu tryst. Sex is fleeting, this is indelible, permanent. Sex is a well rehearsed dance with a single goal. They have no goal. Only the present moment of exquisite union. With no beginning or end, it's timeless, unstructured wistful enlightenment.

They're not making love either. They're retrieving it, releasing it, expressing it, sharing it. They're making something, but love they already have.

House thrusts slowly, trying to stifle his deja vu. He remembers when they did this before. It was dark but he remembers the smell, the taste, the complete mobilization of all other senses that happens when sight is voluntarily sacrificed.

The static sensation of him sliding through her is completion. It's filling and fulfilling, fused perfection. Their breathing harmonizes, synchronous and slow. Assuaging guilt, building trust, reawakening desire. Each move is progress, each kiss is exaltation, it's healing, the intimacy a temporary plaster cast for their fractured hearts.

Pleasure washes through them at the unfamiliar friction of skin on skin. Cuddy's breasts are crushed against his chest. But they postpone imminent euphoria wanting only to be here, with each other, this entire scene merely an admittance of that fact.

A collaborative confession.

They know the potential of surrendering, but this isn't about pleasure, not really.

It's about presence.

Possibility.

As torrid waves pulse through them they surf the edge of ecstasy without going over. Inconceivable intensity as their arousal builds, hour after hour and when they near climax, they relax, mutually agreeing to not end it, not yet.

Cuddy rises, lifting her mouth off of his, House tries to pull her back down, and when she doesn't comply, he sits up. Swinging in his lap, a flawless motion, Cuddy's cooing as she nears rapture again, her mouth falls to his neck, sucking, giving him a hickey even the most amorous adolescent would envy. Her heels lock behind his back, they are fantastically bound. An exact pressure,forwards, backwards, they find a rhythm, gradually becoming one.

Movement stops. House can feel the energy surging through him, like mercury rising in a thermometer. He lays down and she clings to him, they begin thrusting again slow, strong, and somehow still gentle. Her mouth is sugar, deliciously sweet on his. They focus on only each other - generous and receptive, lingering longer, the movement shallow but smooth.

When he hears the silence of opacity give way to traffic and car doors and birdsong, House knows night is transitioning into twilight. That morning is approaching, they have forgotten about time entirely. This precious conquest must soon come to an end.

Defying the temptation to come apart, hips rock and shift, pelvises align and they prepare to finally be defeated. Observing her with as much resolute eagerness as she him, House quickens his pace, moving faster in her, with her, holding her tighter and closer, each kiss, each thrust deeper than the last. Cuddy can feel orgasm advancing from afar, as she has all night, and she tries to resist it, but resisted, constrained, deprived of an outlet, the orgasm is that much more intense, the pleasure flows through her as never before.Her muscles clench around him, she writhes, their mouths ceaselessly connected. She's trembling,groaning, riding relentlessly. Feeling her convulse, hearing her utterly enraptured voice, House can no longer hold back, he thrusts, juts, his hands grasping, squeezing as the heat rushes out of him an into her and she gives it back with the hot blossom of her mouth against his. He comes for minutes, and Cuddy comes again with him, surprised and breathless. They're reciprocating everything air, love, life.

Even their hearts are beating in sync.

It's more than release. It's validation, combination, souls escaping and coalescing. Eloping. Not only do they recognize what they are to each other, they cherish it. It is a revival of faith, acceptance of destiny.

Cuddy rests on him, the warmth of his chest comforting in the afterglow. They hold each other closer, grateful for the gravity that is keeping them together. He's still inside her, afraid that by disconnecting it may all end. That she will get out of bed, and keep going, that this may be again what it was once before.

He can't let go.

Cuddy radiates calm. Both of them now in a silent lull, neither asleep nor awake, the strange state when dreams seem the most real. House wonders if this was all a dream. If the ineffable love he feels for her is just a figment. But as she strokes his forehead,neither saying a word, the pain of doubt slowly recedes. It is all very real.

They fall asleep before dawn, knowing nothing more than this.


	4. Levity

IV. Levity

The wind cries, a window shakes, but they don't hear the morning break, today - a silhouette of yesterday. House wakes first, overwhelmed at the sight of her defenseless body still beside him. An apricot halo outlining each contour, Cuddy is sleeping beauty again. And before another thought can cross his mind, their lips are touching in his gallant attempt to awaken her with a kiss. To manifest their own fable. Suspecting she wants happily ever after and not the morning after.

Last night was, if nothing else, a myth.

Eyes open in response to the warmth and taste of his mouth, and the beat that her heart skips. His are closed, as if he's still asleep, he looks peaceful, happy.

Cuddy's hand grazes a cheek, the back of it running across his jaw. When House opens his eyes, he looks scared and goes to roll back to his side of the bed, but she stops him from cowering. From drifting away, abandoning her again.

Day is different than night. At night they can't see the flaws, they can forget their titles, his scar isn't there. He's only been with women at night since the infarction. House sighs, wishing more than anything for it to still be night.

Cuddy holds him close knowing that what they are initiating under the scorching scrutiny of the morning sun is a momentous decision. It is the impetus they need to attain happiness. They kiss again and as he pulls away to breathe, House stares at her pale, naked, immaculate body, bright as the new day. And on his bed.

It's breathtaking.

With buried heads they both forget all of the past and its regrets. Bodies vulnerable and charged, together now just one beating heart as Cuddy catches his breath. They are sideways smiling, facing each other. House's hand outlines her curves gently, his eyes fixed to hers.

He revels in his indecision of what to touch, kiss, cherish next. His thumb pushes a stray hair away out of the corner of her eye, and he leans on top of her. Devouring, worshipping every molecule, every detail, every second she is here with him. Last night was a choice on both their parts. And so it this.

House keeps his eyes closed, not wanting to see if she disagrees. He kisses her cheek, chin, licks the arch of her upper lip, and finally trails down to her breasts. He wants their love to come alive. For each movement, each minute spent to mean something. For their gaze to have subtext and their breath interpretation.

For this to _be_ as significant as it feels.

Barely waking, they're tangled- in sheets, in circumstances, with each other. House braces his weight on his arms, and his hips fall hard onto hers. Pretending to be strong his weakness is unmistakable when he looks up at her and rests his lips on her nose, pausing.

The feeling of her under him is fantastic, not because of the control, because of the disappearance, the denial of his handicap. He wants to be inside of her right now, more than anything. But he needs her to want it as much as he does.

Staring at him, eyes only mist and water, she holds her breath. Suddenly brave, and no longer shy she knows she needs him and puts a hand down, guiding him against and then into her, rocking forward so, so slowly. At the moment of penetration, Cuddy closes her eyes. The pleasure suffusing her body calls for darkness. This darkness is pure, perfect, thoughtless; without end, without borders, infinite. And at this moment of reconnection, of inconceivable completion she dissolves into this infinity, herself becoming infinite.

House pumps into her slowly, each stroke different than any last night. The weight of him on her is a perfect pressure, a perfect balance. She frames his face with her hands, freezing all movement and kisses him passionately, all she can do to keep from crying. When it becomes a struggle for him, Cuddy raises and bends her knees and they roll over onto their sides. She adjusts, wrapping her legs around him, her hands high on his back, his face buried in her chest. His tongue laps around each hard pink nipple, the beard tickling delicate porcelain skin when his face ascends.

In this position he's hitting a spot she never knew existed.They are comfortable, inside a ring of arms, he drives in quick and deep then pulls out almost entirely. He wants this to last, to never end. And she wants to feel it all, every stroke, every right move and every wrong one, not knowing how or if this will ever happen again. Not knowing if she can ask the question anyway. If she should. Or if this has complicated things beyond platonic reconciliation. She's been reminded how wonderful it is to be with someone and knows she will want it again.

Cuddy kisses him, long and deep and sweet, just savoring the simplest affection. A hand grips his bicep, and the other spreads over his chest. He cups her breast in one palm, the other warm on the small of her back.

Shifting again, House turns over onto his back, pulling her on top of him. He's impossibly deep on the first thrust, bumping her cervix and she moans. So close she begins rocking toward surrender.When he holds her, a possessive hand on each hip, she forgets about choices and consequences. About weight and scales. Because here, for this moment, balanced above this man, this broken, hopeless, brilliant man she is weightless, and the hue, the absence of cynicism in his eyes confirms that they're sharing this lightness. An invigorating levity they can achieve only with each other. It's something they've never experienced before and may never again. But she doesn't care, this moment of flying, of defying- transcending gravity, when nothing else matters, is enough.

It's more than enough.

His fingers move against her flesh coaxing the energy up and through her. Cuddy rises and falls unbearably slowly, trying to prolong their moment of intimacy. House kisses her tenderly,and she knows she'll be tasting him for weeks. And it'll be monthsbefore he does laundry, washing away the scent of her on his bed, in his life.

Legs knotted, bodies fusing, existential bliss as the purest pleasure consumes them simultaneously. Cuddy pulls him even closer, pelvises grinding as she bites his lip in a rapturous kiss. Inspired, heroic House plunges furiously combining, motionless as the heat surges through them both, gushing out of him and rising through her. She's breathless, her orgasm remarkably intense and magnifying. Neither blink in an attempt to sustain the unending ecstasy, the elevation. Each usurping the other's body, the other's soul, exchanging power for submission, tomorrow for eternity, vacancy for presence.

Linear rays of dawn shining through blinds, past curtains into their hearts. A flame sparks as they tremble in this embrace, sweat and silent gasps provoking the fire.

If true love is longing for the half of ourselves we have lost, their search is over. This is how each piece fits, how the halves become a whole.

The room smells like spring and perfume and clean skin on cotton sheets. House dozes off, but Cuddy can't. Feeling something undeniable and horribly afraid that she's falling in love again, she tosses and turns, watching him sleep. It's not just concern anymore. And it's always been more than friendship. There's no way she can ask him now,not without revealing how she feels. And she can't do that without jeopardizing everything they have.

This. Work. Everything.

Torn again, between the happiness of the present and potential of the future, Lisa Cuddy must choose one life altering option.

In the afternoon, as they lay naked and spent, House kisses behind one of her ears, because it is close, and irresistible, and then he stands, dressing and heading toward the kitchen.

When he returns, with a bowl of cornflakes, anticipating eating them in bed and at her side, Cuddy is up and dressed. Panicked, House is speechless, and before he can muster a plea to sit, sleep, stay- she speaks.

"I should go."

House nods without thinking. She waits for more of a response, but it's delayed.

With restrained chaos and confused motives his objectivity returns,

"Okay."

A saga suspended.

The sound of her heels is painful as she steps out of his bedroom.

"You-"

He starts but can't finish the invitation, suddenly feeling like a burden to her. A patient not an accomplice. Stupid for expecting more. He's just a liability, a victim again. There was no guarantee but the reliance, the security of last night and this morning felt like a promise.

Respecting her choice to leave now, he almost understands.

Cuddy stands waiting then pecks him on the cheek and walks away reluctantly.

It's all an abstract picture. A still life. Some sort of stream of consciousness painting. There's a convoluted aesthetic beneath the mess. An emotional expression before him, cubist or impressionistic, it doesn't matter. House can't tell where the canvas stops. How the love they carry inside can be passed. Or if it's capable of continuing.

So he sits, alone again and confounded by the unfamiliar desire to not be.

At the hospital, Cuddy distracts herself away from the love he is contemplating. There are more questions than answers. Maybe House hasn't really changed. He's fooled her before, she perjured herself believing he was off vicodin. She can't be that naive again.

Cuddy watched him push Stacy away. Twice. He wanted Stacy, he loved Stacy, but always thought he deserved the misery more. House can't push _her_ away if she runs first.

So Cuddy thinks about mobiles, and cribs and pacifiers some more. What color the nursery might be. And baby names. She is still a little girl in her mother's shoes and jewelry, dreaming of her wedding day. Of her honeymoon. And of holding a beautiful child that is unmistakably hers.

_**arithmetic**_

House's head is swimming. With the echoes that remain of old friends and lovers, their features bleeding together in his brain. Stacy and Cuddy. Repeated attempts, decisive failures. Juxtaposed at this moment, it's hard to tell them apart. He's always had an allergy to human emotion and been tempted by the very mention of an open door. But now he wants to be something more than what he was before. With Stacy he was a remainder, what was left in the ruins of their mistakes. The product of a doomed formula. A long relationship ending in division. Debating his nihilism, he desperately wants to believe in _something_. House doesn't know yet that love, a completely separate and different equation than relationships is not long division. It is limitless, an infintesimal, intuitive, with incalculable potential. It's not a mathematical theory, it's cognitive belief. It's what he needs to have faith in, empirical evidence presented last night and this morning. He already is more than what he was. And so is she.

It's a revelation. Nearly a commitment. He almost married Stacy. They lived together. What does that make Cuddy? What does he want now?

A week passes. They don't see each other. Or speak to each other.On the eighth day, feeling compelled to move, he ventures out, wandering aimlessly on his new bike until he finds the courage to drive toward the destination that will confront the mystery.

House makes it to her doorstep, a fisted hand rises to meet the door. But he can't knock. He's beginning to see patterns in the pain. And suspecting it was all just an impulsive repeat of what they let happen years before. He waits on her doorstep until street lights come on and moths congregate to bright patches of the porch. And then he leaves, knowing that it's wrong but certain he has no other choice.

The next day idles, Cuddy stacks tangible administration in a pile on her desk and roams the hospital, her heart leading her feet to one place alone.

The maternity ward taunts her. Crying babies, new and expectant mothers, it's torturous. Until she allows hope to permeate her despair. And envisions herself in a delivery room, giving birth - or at this window, looking in, but not at strangers, at her own son or daughter. At a life she created, contributed to this world so rife with destruction.

Lisa Cuddy has been waiting for a sign to tell her where she belongs. And as she turns away from the window, pacing farther from this inspired vision, but carrying the potential with her, she's looking down at her feet, afraid of letting anybody see how bloodshot and teary her eyes are, and walks, with desultory direction, until her brain and heart and feet lose momentum. She takes a deep breath and looks up to see where she is. Turning her head she finds a glass door, the sign she's been looking for, telling her only a name, his.

_**aquatic affirmation**_

The apartment is beginning to seem like sanctuary. A place she goes when the rest of the world is purposely deceitful, too harsh and brutal to face alone. Home. Hers is after all just an address, a number to dictate where she should go at the end of the day. But she convinces herself she's visiting only to check up on him.

An employee, a friend.

He opens the door and lets her in, not exactly friendly or welcoming about it.

Redressing her abrupt departure the last time,

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine." He says sitting on his couch and picking up a medical journal.

Cuddy sits, sinking into the cushion beside him. He keeps pretending to read.

"Wilson called," she lies.

"Don't care," and so does he.

"House, I -

I don't know why..."

He puts the journal down and looks at her.

"I don't want this to change anything."

He makes a face and looks away to speak,

"Nothing's changed. You're still wearing low cut tops to procure large sums of money for the hospital by distracting benefactors with your cleavage.

And I've only bathed in self loathing the last four days."

He looks at her briefly then under his breath,

"It's the same."

Cuddy's hand touches his leg as she stands and looks down at his sad face, fighting the urge to kiss him.

She believes him.

"I'll run you a bath," she says, trying to sound clinical and not provocative.

Redux as she turns the water on. After a minute he comes in the bathroom, undressing and getting in while she finds him a towel.

"Care to join me?" He says sinking and expecting nothing more than a sigh and a familiar glare.

Cuddy smirks and turns away. As her hand touches the knob she hesitates. House is ignorant to her reluctance. When he hears the door close, he's not looking. She's still on this side of it, with him. He turns his head and she gives him a long careful searching stare, complete with irony's intelligent sparkle.

Grinning she blushes and starts to unbutton quickly.

"Slow," he manages, swallowing midword.

"Slower."

Cuddy strips between clouds of steam, the air thick and making her skin moist. It's greater than any fantasy. He's naked, she's confident, it's excruciatingly hot. The blouse comes off gracefully, the skirt slides down in slow motion, her back is to him when the bra disappears, and she lets him peel the panties off her hips from where he sits. They fall quickly to her ankles.

His arms are open when she lifts one leg, her back still to him, and submerges a foot in the water. House admires this rear view as she slowly descends, her ass, her pale frame landing between his legs. The water is scalding and when she finally does complete this tantalizing act of sitting, Cuddy is already covered in sweat. Tense though, not quite uncomfortable. He runs a hand down each of her arms to encourage her to relax and to see if she's real. He can hardly believe this is happening. After a breath she embraces the heat, her body absorbs it, becomes it and she eases back against his hard, wet chest.

Uncertain if she is just calling his bluff, House can't decide what to do next. They lay like this a few minutes enjoying the heat of the water and the other person's body. Cuddy can feel his heart beating behind her left shoulder blade, so rapid she worries. Trying to calm him a little she rests her head back against him, and he lifts a hand to push an errant strand of her damp hair aside. The hand glides down her neck to her shoulder. The other rises and he begins rubbing her back, kissing it intermittently.

Suds lapping at the sides of her breasts, they drift in the warm water, tiny fingers drawing circles on his knee. Without words, this is all the need to say. Admiring the gleaming curves of her cleavage and the tight muscles of his petite boss in the dim fluorescence House knows he has to do something.

"Oh," she says into his mouth as he slides awkwardly against the porcelain, bracing himself so he can kiss her.

Lips cross her cheek and move down her neck, his graying beard scrapes against the soft place where her pulse is and along the shoulder. A hand runs over her breasts, feeling the ache in his leg from the way he's sitting, and eventually the hand falls and begins tracing shapes on her thigh under the slosh of the soapy water.

House is throbbing, wedged between her back and his abdomen. Enticing him Cuddy pushes back, the buoyancy lifting her up and she grinds against him, slick and smooth. Hearing a faint and masculine moan she does it again and he immediately responds with fingers on her clit, rubbing in circles, massaging firm and slow.

Rocking against his hand she keeps rising and falling, stroking him as he strokes her. When he can tell she's close, he lets her rise one last time and on her reentry into the tub he penetrates her. Fluidly, his erection hotter than the water around it. She squirms, slippery in his arms, almost coming on contact and gasping at being filled with the length of him and a splash of hot bathwater. He thrusts deep, the movement flowing, waves building, the liquid a panacea for the gravity that has returned. Heaviness diminishes in water, though it's an illusion.

Everything seems easy, lighter, alleviated.

House shifts again, knocking his recently fractured skull on the tile behind him. He kisses her neck, breathing into her ear and pumping at an angle neither have known before. Cuddy's struggling in agony at not being able to see him. An arm stretches back, reaching behind his head and pulling his face to hers, her orgasm starts with this kiss, her sleek hair against his skin, sweat trickling down his temple and on one final deep thrust she screams into his mouth, unable to resist coming apart. When lips unlock, she moans into his chin and the slope of his cheek. He's frustrated that he can only see the top of her head and not the expression on her face.

Holding her as the writhing subsides, until she's limp against him, panting, House is still fantastically hard.

So they get out of the tub, dripping and without draining it. Cuddy leads him to the bed, licks warm droplets off the inside of his thigh and kisses away the sweat from the corners of his eyes.

He kisses her belly button dipping his tongue in, and makes his way up to her breasts and collar bone, the room a seasonal pastel shade of dusk. Neither care that the covers are damp, both slippery with sweat and soap they seem younger, they feel younger, drenched hair and a youthful tint to their skin, the gray is gone, ageless beauty reborn. They shift at a half word and a muffled murmur and he pushes into her with the same fluid motion as in the tub. It's gentle and soft and considerate, a way she's never described House. He's focused on her, forgetting again about his own pleasure and just basking in her delight. Wanting her to stay when this is over he tries to say as much but all he can expel is an incoherent endearment, sincere and understood as she rocks up toward him, forcing him deeper, a subtle spasm when her muscles clench around him and she opens her mouth for his tongue. A few more slow, smooth strokes before he explodes into her, a necessary release, both confessing the other is something that they need.

The bliss reaches their eyes and both cry a little, hoping it's dark enough to seem like leftover bath water. A secret has been revealed, a declaration of dependence. They need each other, and with only this on his mind, House kisses the nape of her neck, a soaked ebony strand catching on his slick jaw.

On each other, in each other, with each other, more perfect circumstances do not exist.

And House realizes the act, this moment, all of it has the meaning he's been longing for. Cuddy's stomach rising and falling as she breathes, the subtext of desire - to read between the lines he must just embrace the body between his sheets. So he's not just discovering the meaning and beauty and purpose of it all, he's holding it, knowing it, loving her.

This love is finally alive, more than they may even know .

Cuddy does stay the night. And the ecstasy continues with milk and spoons and bowls of breakfast cereal in the morning. When she does leave, although they never speak of any real plans, House knows that it is all more than it seems. Three times she's come to him, three times. She may return again. And again. This could be something. So he sits and thinks about her body, and her voice, and the warmth of her presence.

He licks her spoon to taste her one last time, the fleeting familiar flavor making him feel restless and incomplete in her absence.

Four more days pass of little communication. On the third Cuddy locks herself in her office with an unbearable headache. On the fourth she begins running a fever and vomits at breakfast and lunch. The fifth she calls off work, something she hasn't done in nine years, certain she has gotten the stomach flu from a clinic patient. But at home she doesn't convalesce, she contemplates. Feigning illness with complacency, she doesn't really feel that sick. Physically yes, she's achy, nauseated, dizzy and dehydrated. But an overall sense of well being prevails. She feels as if she has a future again. A cure that western medicine has never offered. Together, with House. It's a way she hasn't felt since Richard, or he since Stacy. And she knows it's mutual, she knows he sees the same latent potential that she does.

But both are scared. Afraid of failing. Horrified by happiness. Aware they could lose what little they have, everything they've worked so hard for. Cuddy has been here before. Sitting in her kitchen sipping tea, she begins comparing House and Richard.

Initially they seem to have nothing in common. Richard was a literature professor and House believes the human condition reveals itself through science, not poetry or words or an introspective narrative.

Richard was polite, House is rude. Though for good reason. His arrogance is not without a solid foundation. He is the best doctor in her hospital. He works for the mystery, diagnosises for the puzzle and with a passion that makes him beyond brilliant. Richard was smart but not as obsessed with or dedicated to his work.

In bed they're also quite different. Richard would talk to her the entire time. Whisper sonnets through foreplay, mumble a haiku as he climaxed. House knows talk is cheap. Words meaningless. That passion is carnal, love ethereal, neither verbal. Their rapport has always been intuitive, and in bed it's electric. Richard would smother her in the aftermath of their lovemaking. Squeezing and spooning, stifling all movement until he passed out. She would have to pry herself out of his clasp. House holds but doesn't strangle her. There's body contact, a caress, a looped arm, but it's loose, it doesn't bind her to one place in his bed. Or, in his life.

Despite their sharp contrast, she still has loved both men. The only similarity that seems significant to her is the pregnancy issue. It ended what she had with Richard and if she's not careful, it may ruin the chemistry between her and House. The trust and devotion may all be lost if he says 'no' to her question. Or possibly even if he says 'yes.'

Her hesitation is understandable but she's still determined. Cuddy walks to her phone to call House and arrange a date of some sort, to finally ask him. But when she picks the receiver up she takes a long look at the calendar on the wall beside it.

And hangs up immediately.

_**one chance**_

Returning from the pharmacy, having drank about a gallon of ginger ale on the way back, Cuddy rushes to her bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, she lets out a nervous sigh and puts her head in her hands a moment before reaching into the bag and pulling out a home pregnancy test. A shaking hand opens the cardboard box and she pees on the plastic stick, holding her breath, something she hasn't done for more than a year.

She exhales and stands, her knees faltering, knowing it doesn't take a doctor to diagnose the cause of her late period. She hasn't even considered this a possibility the last few days. Fateful irony. Unperceived intervention. Another fortuity, another chance, another random exponentially critical event.

Maybe.

Closing her eyes, she sits on the edge of her tub a few minutes, then opens them to see the results.

The next day Cuddy goes to work, her stomach revolting less, her headache gone, having never made the phone call.

House's genius can be undermined by very few things. Unfortunately a naked, sweaty, coital Lisa Cuddy is one of those things. But as he sits alone, the television snowing softly in the background he begins reconsidering the last few nights they spent together. And objectivity is obscured by the details. He's trying to remember every aspect, sight, sound, taste. He goes to take another bath, to try and force each outstanding memory to consume his senses. As he turns the water on, an anomalous feature strikes him. Cuddy's areolas, darker than they should be. Darker than they were the first night. Perhaps it was just the bathroom lighting, maybe he never got a good look at the color in the first place. But he knows her nipples, as well as he knows anything. The eventual epiphany is the heaviest weight falling with ruthless force, the gravity of reality.

And he rushes out - driving for the hospital, needing to tell her.

The clinic is packed. Loud. House pushes through a crowd of uninsured sick people, dizzy as he approaches her office. Wearing his white jacket, appropriate, he storms in as he often does with revelatory diagnoses. Then he freezes at the sight of her, standing in front of her desk, turning to answer the phone. Knowing that the call will postpone destiny, he turns his head and this is when he sees it.

A gun.

In the hands of a man in the doorway. Aimed at Cuddy. House runs toward her, in front of her, not entirely aware of what he's doing but feeling an inexplicable need to protect the chance that they somehow got everything right.

Three deafening shots echo, dissolving into silence.

The first two hit him and the third is security's killing the would be dean assassin.

House's body staggers, he falls to bended knees, then collapses, landing at her feet. Cuddy plummets to his side lifting his limp lifeless head onto her lap. Screaming for help not believing any of this has happened, she doesn't panic or weep, his blood on her fingertips, his life in her hands.


	5. Plans

Part 5/9

V. Plans

"The Complaint of Lisa," is the only Swinburne poem Cuddy remembers.

_ There is no woman living who draws breath_

_ So sad as I, though all things sadden her._

_ There is not one upon life's weariest way_

_ Who is weary as I am weary of all but death._

Richard would recite it, all she knows now is the beginning, and something about sunflowers. Their bedroom was painted with sunflowers, she is thinking about bedrooms. And about nurseries.

At one side of House's hospital bed and in clothes she's been wearing for days, Cuddy waits. With overwhelming panic and anxiety-no, anxiousness. He's stable, has come in and out of consciousness a few times, but never lucid long enough to talk. The morphine is keeping him out of pain and her in agonizing suspense.

One bullet grazed his temple, a flesh wound. The other hit his left shoulder and lodged in the clavicle. Surgery and sutures and he's here. She's holding his cold hands, rubbing, trying to warm them and wake him.

With each ascending peak of the EKG, each beep, tone, pulse, she is reminded of the passing time.

Summer is close. A solstice approaching. The smell of the season has always seduced her.

The results of the tests come back into her mind. Three, to be exact.

She's known for days and isn't certain what she'll say when he wakes. The plans she made have changed. And changed again.

The fragile edifice of their undefined relationship may come tumbling down.

House opens his eyes while she's looking at the monitor.

A simple twist of fate, against all the odds,

"You're pregnant."

Cuddy pauses, smiles, looks at him.

"I know."

He squints, confused.

"Not really the reaction I was expecting.

How long have you known?"

She shakes her head and he reaches for her hand.

"You really need to do something about the gun policy of your hospital. Are all of your patients packing?

Do you hand fire arms out on admission?"

"It was the fath-"

"Don't care."

"You don't care why somebody tried to shoot me?"

"They didn't. That's all that really matters."

A beat.

"So...I took a few bullets for a pregnant woman. That has to counteract a few of my vices," he says reaching for his vicodin.

Cuddy lets go of his hand and goes to stand.

"Don't."

"What?" She asks.

"We have to talk about this."

"I know but-"

"Pregnancy is sort of a big deal, Dr. Cuddy."

"I can just tell people the IVF worked."

"I didn't know you restarted it."

"I didn't. I was planning to."

Without considering,

"I was going to ask you anyway."

Another beat.

"You were?"

She nods.

"But I never intended for any of this-"

"Why didn't you?"

"What?"

"Why didn't you ask me?"

Cuddy pauses, not knowing the answer herself.

"I was going to let you recover. The bus crash, Amber, your head. You needed time."

"Liar.

You were afraid of what I'd say."

"Of course I was afraid of what you'd say. It would complicate the hell out of everything."

"And _this_ isn't complicated?"

"House, I'm sorry.

Sorry that my patients are trigger happy, sorry that I didn't ask you sooner. Sorry that somehow after a year of trying and failing I somehow managed to get pregnant.

(whispering) To you."

House stares into her eyes, grinning at the insuperable joy behind them.

"But I'm not asking you for anything. No commitment or sacrifice. I'm not even going to tell anybody until I figure it all out myself.

This doesn't have to change anything."

"I know a zygote that would disagree," he says condescendingly.

Cuddy almost snickers, not even trying to conceal the glow that radiates when she hears the vocabulary of obstetrics.

She can't help but feel incredibly lucky.

"So what do we do now?"

"I don't know," she answers, never so happy about her own uncertainty.

House nods, weaving his fingers through hers, two creased and dimpled palms embracing unknown plans.

-- -- --

It was a distraught father who wielded the gun. His daughter wasn't eligible for a new heart and he thought he could persuade the transplant committee by shooting the Dean of Medicine.

He and his daughter are both dead now.

--

House recovers a while, Cuddy at his side most of the time. Resuming her work on medication for the morning (and afternoon) sickness, she is abundantly hormonal, the dominant mood among many being happiness. The nurses notice, the doctors notice, even the new security guard outside her office recognizes Lisa Cuddy as being different somehow.

She starts taking prenatal vitamins and debates which obstetrician to entrust with her secret. And decides on Dr. Patrick although part of her finds a gynecologist named Lolita laughable. Patrick is the only female ob/gyn at PPTH. And Cuddy desperately wants to share this most feminine experience with at least one other woman.

The first visit is very routine and clinical. Dr. Patrick doesn't inquire about the father, except for his medical history, and Cuddy suspects it's because most men don't start attending doctor visits until there are arms and legs and genitals involved.

Progressing through her first trimester now, while the doctor assures her everything's fine and gives advice for the days ahead, Cuddy's mind wanders. House is still in the hospital, another floor, a different wing. She's both comforted by his nearness and saddened by the distance.

A part of her wants him here.

She has her first sonogram, tears streaming down her face at the sight of the embryo in black and white.

Needing him so much closer she's wondering how he feels.

_**the candor of composition**_

Gregory House is tired of being bed bound. He's had time to absorb all the recent events and still doesn't understand a thing. The man knows that day to day life is bombarded with fortuities and accidents. They're called coincidences. "Co-incidence" meaning that two events happen at the same time. The great majority of these simultaneous happenings goes unnoticed.

If House had gone home to drink that night instead of to the bar,Cuddy wouldn't be pregnant right now. If he had called Foreman instead of Wilson, Amber would be alive. Nobody would be standing around thinking there is something wrong with an unpregnant Cuddy or a still living cut throat bitch.

But because of the tragedy and triumph of unbelievable circumstances all attention is focused on the smallest choices. Chance and fate. Right and wrong.

House got shot before when Cuddy was considering him as a donor. The symmetry - a motif, seeming to mark the beginning of some silent saga, is also initiating the ending.

A seemingly almost fictive balance, repeated events.

A strange teleology. A symmetrical line of occurrences.

A palindrome, really.

Human lives are composed in precisely this fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by the yearning for an aesthetic, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence or accident (the bus crash, pregnancy, being shot) into a motif which then assumes a permanent place in the individual's life.

The first time he was shot, House used it as an opportunity to get the ketamine treatment. He finds beauty in truth and the truth was that ketamine could cure him. The man walked again, he ran. It didn't last but in the end he benefited from the experience.

This time he was shot because of the truth, not for it. He knew she could be pregnant. He knew he couldn't lose her. So he protected the possibility, the chance, the truth.

Honesty in a world of lies.

Now fascinated by mysterious coincidences House has discovered a new dimension of beauty in his life.

Cuddy goes book shopping. She raids the 'mother to be' shelf, taking books on how to name a baby, breast feed, be a single parent and any topic she finds remotely relevant. Then she strolls back to the children's section, picking up various Beatrice Potter and Winnie the Pooh volumes. At the checkout she knows she'll never be this happy in a Barnes and Noble again.

Whether he realizes or not, House is also sublimely ecstatic at the parental prospect. Proud really. His boys can swim.Years of narcotics but always boxers instead of briefs.

"Wow." He murmurs to the empty room as if he just realized he's created life.

This isn't going to help his God complex. He's trying to ignore the complexities of the situation.

Pregnancy is complicated. Especially between two people terrified of admitting how they feel about each other.

But now they may have no choice.

_**love with the proper stranger**_

At the end of the week when House insists he is ready to go home, Cuddy pretends that she's taking him there but they end up in front of her place.

"Hmm. Didn't realize we moved in together. Are we going steady too? This doesn't have anything to do with me knocking you up, does it?"

"I discharged you five days early. It's here or the hospital."

She says parking in her driveway, headlights burning into the garage door. When she gets out House follows watching the maternal image take form.

They order take out, Cuddy afraid of the insults that would ensue if she cooked dinner. Sitting on her couch with him, as if it's the most ordinary thing, she turns the TV on and they eat.

After channel surfing a while, Cuddy settles on something black and white that she recognizes as "Stella Dallas."

As House watches her watch the film, he realizes she's been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound just like a movie.

And considers making plans to rent a camera and a van and produce the motion picture she's longed for since childhood. He could write a script, storyboard the future, erasing their uncertainty, assigning specific roles.

She could be cast as the amicable American wife balancing her career and motherhood. He could be her accomplice, a husband maybe, a father certainly.

Greasing the lens, he'll frame the shot, they could be the picture of domesticity, a family in the suburbs. And when the slate snaps, he'll yell 'quiet on the set' and then call 'action!'.

Everything will fall. Fall right into place.

They'll move to the next scene, the next set on their New Jersey sound stage. When they forget where they've left off, the timecode will remind them. He'll kiss her goodbye as he leaves for work, it will be classic.

As House stares at her, mentally starting the screenplay (INT. LIVING ROOM- NIGHT) a sudden fear fills him. That he's no thespian, or charming lead, not even a supporting actor, but a stand in. Assuming a temporary and insignificant role in this woman's life.

They can't even decide on a frame rate to project it at.

As badly as he wants to believe that there is truth, that love is real he has little faith in the cinematic vision.

She's undoubtedly Nathalie Wood, pregnant - independent, beside him. But he's no Steve McQueen, this is only half of "Love with the Proper Stranger," at best.

And he envies the rat at this moment.

Cuddy cries through the second half of "Stella Dallas" and when it's over she stands, asks House if he needs anything and then goes to bed.

He sits on her couch in the dark a long time, not laying down because he knows he won't sleep. It bothers him that they can't be more. And it bothers him more that that bothers in the first place.

Early in the morning, when the crescent moon still hangs in the heavens, House hears her sick in the bathroom and goes in to kneel beside her, in front of the toilet. With the utmost tenderness and compassion, he pulls her hair back out of her face and doesn't cringe once while she gags.

The exhausted look she gives him is true love. And the hand on the back of her neck holding her hair is unconditional devotion.

They need not wait for a callback, they've long been cast in the picture.

They are the characters they long to be. He helps her back to her room, wishing he could carry her there and Cuddy sprawls across the bed, still a little green. When House goes to turn away, return to the couch, her hand catches his and he stops.

Sitting on the bed unsure if he's there because she might be sick again or if she really wants him,he wavers.

Then a hand runs up his arm and he lies beside her, on top of the covers. As she dozes off, Cuddy on her side, lifts a leg, linking it around his, her nose and mouth resting against the muscle of his right arm until he wraps it around her.

House falls asleep a smitten survivor, having come so close to dying that he finally can start living.


	6. Misadventure in the Garden State

Part 6/9

VI. Misadventure in the Garden State

When Cuddy opens her eyes later in the morning, she sees House's hands.

On a steering wheel. In her Mercedes.

They're definitely moving. Forward.

"Where are we?"

"Jersey. Duh."

"Where are we going?"

"Hell probably. With a child born out of wedlock.

But I don't believe in God.

And I've always been fond of warm places anyway."

"Monmouth?!" She shouts, twisting her head to look back at the precipatory road sign a few miles before the exit.

"Why are we going to Monmouth?"

"Beach.

We're going to Monmouth _Beach_."

"Why?"

"It's summer. It's what people.do. I get a few extra weeks to recover.

And you have a long weekend."

Squinting incredulously,

"No I don't. I have a meeting at nine Monday morning."

"I rescheduled it."

Cuddy sighs in disapproval, a smirk slowly stealing her mouth.

"This is what happens when you aren't working, I end up pregnant and kidnapped."

"You knew the risks when you hired me."

She snickers and leans on the car door, grateful for the privilege of being a passenger. The guide rail blurs into the unchanging landscape, mile after mile. Automotive ambience becomes coherent, they hear the weatherman on the radio forecasting rain.

"I don't have a bathing suit."

"Yes you do.

It's a bikini," He says raising one eyebrow and with a most primeval grin.

House shifts out of cruise control as four lanes become two. Interstate 571 merges into the Jersey turnpike and then highway 33E. Ocean Boulevard turns into Valentine Street and then Riverdale Avenue. It's a halcyon day, as they near the shore the salt breezes scurry by and they begin to picture the ocean with long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over a cerulean sea. Then they hurry through the little town and it all flashes upon their consciousness to a mighty paean of emotion.

Neither has been to the beach in years.

House leads them a mile or more along the golden coast. He considers taking her hand but settles for intermittently resting a palm on the small of her back. When they reach a deserted stretch, near where the Shrewsbury River parallels the Atlantic, he spreads out a blanket and sits, patting the spot beside him and looking up at Cuddy.

The bikini she's wearing is about three sizes too small for her already swelling breasts, and she gives her perverted diagnostician a look of disdain every time she gets a peripheral view of her own cleavage.

She does look gorgeous in it though, and he knows it.

"Really, why are we here?" Cuddy asks to the back of House's head as he reaches for sunscreen.

"If that's a philosophical question, you probably don't want my answer," rubbing some on his nose.

Then,

"You're going to get fat soon. Don't you want to flaunt this while you still have it?" He says, eyes glued to her bosom.

"I am not going to get fat..."

"Right. That person growing inside of you just won't take up any room.

And you'll eat _all_ the right things."

It's going to get harder before it gets easy.

Worse before it gets better.

Cuddy's lost in this. She's like she'll always be. A riddle an anomaly, a mystery. House rubs sunscreen into her shoulders and across her back. He squeezes out some more and drops it onto her belly. He really loves touching her stomach now, it's become a fetish, a life fetish.

Or maybe just pride in his accomplishment.

As he massages the lotion over her fair complexion methodically, she watches him stare at her abdomen, knowing she's witnessing paramount sensitivity, rare susceptibility.

The radio was wrong. It's clear and blue as far as they can see. Cuddy stares up into the azure heavens, looking for faces in the few cotton clouds that float by. House listens for patterns in the sound of the endless static sea.

They are silent, happy, nearly complete.

When he turns onto his stomach, Cuddy rubs lotion into his back, the recent wound and stitches in his shoulder confirming his loyalty. She wants to kiss him, to thank him for everything. For this. But as her fingers stroke his back, he knows.

They're touching like lovers now, perhaps a transition.

At least recognition.

The hypnotic cycle of waves and the song of seagulls soaring overhead is a matrimonious ballad. As the day passes, time gradually reveals this spontaneous misadventure as being a kind of honeymoon. As well as a first date.

House's trunks extending to his knees, the broken body seems less scarred in the summer sun. He watches Cuddy walk along the edge where the ocean meets the land as if she's balancing on a highwire at the circus. She tiptoes knee deep into the water, letting the Atlantic baptize her for the new beginning that's fast approaching.

The tide rolls in to claim her patient footprints and she shivers on her way back to the blanket. The rhythm of each step synchronizes with the beating of his heart and House wraps a towel around the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, kissing her forehead gently, as soon as she's within reach.

Normally, a personal proximity to pregnant women makes him nervous, but with her it's comforting and they reciprocate the radiant relaxation, the safety, the invincibility of the moment, of the embrace.

The sun sets, painting the horizon a deeper shade with neon highlights across the meridian of two blues.

The moon brings a cobalt canvas sky, a masterpiece before them. And they gaze side by side at the stars wondering why they've never appreciated the beauty of the garden state at night time. When it becomes unbearable perfection, Cuddy leans over and kisses him on the cheek, her hand splayed over his chest, fingers aligning in the contours of his ribs. Her lips meet his clavicle, the texture of the sutures rough against her mouth.

Since she found out she's pregnant, Cuddy has wanted to make love to him again. It's become their way of translating everything unsaid, a carnal conversation. And part of her is hoping for another godsend, another chance, resolution.

Hungry open mouths meet to the underscore of a crashing tide and swimming in the fragrance of saltwater and coppertone.

Moonlight illuminating the mutual insurmountable desire, House pulls at the strings of her bikini top and slides each strap from her shoulders. His tongue circles each of her now darker nipples and as his hot mouth reaches her neck, she lays down flat on him, their sunburned chests forming their own horizon. With Cuddy inching his shorts down, House's head gets pushed off the blanket, sand washing through his hair. Before he slides inside her, she has a vision. Of how everything connects. The imperceptible now conspicuous. The latent visible. Obvious. This may as close to a wedding night she will be. The last bit of romance and abandonment before parental responsibility assumes priority.

They reunite, a physical union, the corresponding shapes of their bodies perpetually betrothed. She's wet and open and waiting for him as he thrusts up, the movement meticulously shallow.

For House there's something indescribably exhilarating about making love to a pregnant woman. It's something he's never done before. Knowing that the love they carry inside can be passed, exchanged- shared. Fate's beginning to persuade him that they belong together.

Whispering some inaudible confession balanced above him, Cuddy's hair fans through the squall, the breeze making her long locks flow through the air, an invigorating zephyr cooling both of their bodies. She gets a glimpse of the soft shadow of their single shape forming on the sand and pebbles. And whimpers a little at the tremendous contact of hips and thighs, her breasts tickled by chest hair.

The motion is fluid, natural, perfect. Heavy hearts are weightless again. Her toes curl in the sand at the hot breath that scorches her face when House moans, hardening still inside of her. A concentrated caress across the lightly sunkissed curves of her back and bottom as he pushes her down instead of thrusting up, deep inside her assailable, transitioning body.

Nothing has ever felt more right.

He moves in her, throbbing and smooth and with restrained power. It's gentle and warm, the intensity of it rising from the sentimentality. The details. Imprisoned emotions finally freed.

In the middle of eternity, his pace quickens, every inch of their bodies touching and she sees stars spotting the opaque ceiling of the sky, the same stars as in his eyes. He cranes his neck to kiss her and lingers slowing the rock of his hips against hers.

Feeling the inevitable simultaneous crest of their pleasure House doesn't blink, just holds her, channeling, coercing the energy, building it to perfection. The moment before her orgasm Cuddy cries, "Greg," and he kisses her before she can regret it.

But her tongue and teeth continue repeating the name into his mouth as he comes fantastically hard, unimaginably long, muscle and flesh and heat clenching, pulsing, spreading. Cuddy tilts her head up at this sensation, having waited so long for it, and he licks her nape and chin before grinning into her cheek. A wordless vow whispered into her ear.

When he goes to pull out her nails dig into his bicep and he stops. They kiss one last time, holding each other closer than ever.

Their skin's their only home tonight.

They stay like this until twilight and fall into a dreamless sleep, trying hard to stay awake and watch that marvelous moon settle below the sea.

_**strawberry, pomegranate **_

Predicted droplets awaken House. The sun is rising at the far end of an overcast sky. The first thing he sees is an arch, a spectral amalgamation, a rainbow. Lovely and extraordinary for the briefest instant his mind compares it to witnessing childbirth.

Rare and perspective altering. A sight that is its own experience.

He faces Cuddy admiring sleeping beauty and the other life she now embodies, trying to frame his view so that the rainbow is behind her.

An ephemeral image of adoration.

She wakes when his eyelashes tickle her temple. Seeing House look past her, she turns around and it takes her breath away.

On the way back to the car they argue over which prismatic colors they saw reflected and refracted by the sun's rays in the falling rain. As they near other pedestrians, a small and faceless crowd, House pretends to trip over a tiny dune and they finish the journey hand in hand.

They find a bed and breakfast. An old, imposing, Victorian place, sea blue on the outside, saffron and priceless gold within. The archaic architecture makes their stay timeless. Outside the parameters of the present. Far from the calculators of clocks.

Nostalgic for a day that hasn't happened yet, Cuddy takes a shower. As she closes her eyes beneath the warm downpour, doubt dissipates, sorrow's washed away. She sees white doves and periwinkle bouquets, the trickle of the water and hum of the pipes becomes a processional Pachelbel.

Before she can imagine any more details of her illusory wedding Cuddy steps out and is reborn in the doorway. Today is the first day of her life. The water, the rainbow, the night changed everything. House is the first face that she sees. A blind woman before this moment. She has no idea where they are, is trying to forget where she's been, but finally knows where she wants to go. Realizing that she needs him, asking if they can stay together, even when this is over.

Her proposal is just standing here.

Progressing for two happy days, up and down the shore their unequivocal love grows moment by moment.

They stroll through the shops and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen approvingly to all band concerts. At the end of the pier there's a ferris wheel, ancient, dilapidated, and as Saturday night leads them to it, it opens for business and they purchase two tickets.

The wheel diligently rises, rotating the vista and their limitless prospects. The instability, the swinging of their seats, the vertigo, all anxiety evaporates into security, permanence, resolution.

Awe.

Cuddy is at the same great heights she reached once before. Except instead of the hope that she's pregnant, she knows it. And instead of a man running away, leaving her alone, he's beside her. He's scaled the heights with her. Facing the same fear and uncertainty.

If House asked her to marry him at this very moment. High, elevated, floating above the rest of the world, she would say 'yes,' and consider it the easiest decision she's ever made.

But he doesn't ask her. With an arm behind, not around the expectant matriarch, he sways their compartment, laughing, and her shaking hand grabs his thigh. House stops and strokes each of her fingers gently. For the first time, his eyes find and define her empty, naked ring finger.

Forever is much a heavier synonym for what they already have.

They return to their room. The night is young, but their two toned skin is tired. House sits on one side of the bed, she lands between his legs and after hours of just listening to her breathe, he peels the freckles from her sunburnt shoulders. Kissing softly, a breeze from his lips chills the delicate skin. His right hand massages her stomach, and the left runs down a thigh.

They undress like a flashback. House vividly remembering a different time. This reminds him of losing his virginity.The silence, the expectation, the wonder. How they marvel in each touch. Appreciate each kiss. It all feels new.

Like more of their story is unwritten than published and archived.

They make love twice before dawn, without saying a word. When he knows she's asleep, House brings his face to her ear and whispers,

"Lisa," able only to call her by this name while she dreams.

"I love you."

After a minute, Cuddy sighs some indistinguishable word as a kind of delayed response, but he's already asleep.

Sunday draws closer the dreaded prospect of returning. Their honeymoon so short, so incomplete. The thrill diminishing as reality recurs.

Cuddy stares at him asleep, injured, naked beside her. When she makes it to a mirror, examining the new reflection she sees something now healing that she had forgotten was wounded. She's just realizing the impact of him taking two bullets for her. And for her baby. _Their_ baby. She's trying to convince herself he did it for the diagnosis, so that he could be proven right. Martyred.

The man has risked his life for his job countless times.

But she's not his patient. Pregnancy is not an unusual or rare disease.

And he wasn't on the clock.

House watches her dress, trying to see through and into her. Part of him wishes he could be with her at the check ups, that he could have seen the first sonogram, and that he might see the next one, at her side.

Though he's terrified of being temporary, he is trying to find the courage to ask.

They traverse a rather empty stretch of boardwalk. The day is long, the sparkling reflection of the sun on the water is truth. They pass two old fashioned photobooths, one of which is out of order. With the sight of the third, House grabs her hand and pulls her into it .

Cuddy rolls her eyes while he digs for a dollar bill and and smirks at the sense that they're impersonating high school sweethearts.

The flash blinds them, his arm tight around her, their faces close. House contorts his for a few shots and on the last closes his eyes and kisses her on the cheek.

The expression on her face is jubilant exaltation. Inconceivably happiness behind his eyelids.

A series of images on strip of paper, a kind of wedding portrait. At least blatant proof, something tangible they can hold, blacks and whites they can see when the distance becomes too great. When the complexities part them.

To remind them of this trip. A memento of a day they will never speak of but will always remember.

When the picture develops he shows Cuddy and puts it in his wallet. They continue walking, though nowhere in particular.

Later, House buys them drinks, some organic fruit smoothies, Cuddy at his side but staring off at other people's children, momentarily stricken by the fear she many never be the volvo driving soccer mom she sees buying ice cream.

As House pays, the cashier mistakes them for married, saying something to the effect of, "I think your wife will really like the strawberry pomegranate," and on the motion of shaking his head, House stops. He doesn't correct the guy, too smitten (or noble) to insult the woman at his side. And he knows it's a compliment, for him.

As he hands Cuddy the employee endorsed beverage, she asks "What's wrong?" because of the perplexed look on his face, and he finally finishes shaking his head, unable to articulate how lucky he is to be with her and how proud he is for being responsible for the new life he's made.

With her. For her.

Monday breaks stolid and respectable and even the ocean seems restless, the waves lamenting the loss of this apparently espoused couple. Newlyweds. They return to Princeton via the monotony that is the turnpike.

Though Cuddy hasn't thought of Richard much lately, House is thinking of Stacy as he drives.

Stacy shot him. With paintballs of course, but part of him wonders if there's a connection between women he lets himself love and small arms. A weapons motif in his love life.

Really there is another reason Stacy has reappeared in his consciousness. Their first year together, they had a pregnancy scare. The ten home pregnancy tests all told her yes, and while in limbo waiting for the hospital's confirmation, House - although in a state of excessive panic, contemplated asking her to marry him. A year was long enough, he decided, and he _did_ love her. But he didn't ask her, and she wasn't pregnant. They chose more prudent forms of contraception thereafter and he thanked God for not making such a stupid mistake. He hasn't considered marriage since.

Until now.


	7. The Only Offer

Part 7/9

VII. The Only Offer

Why women have a need to create life from within themselves, why they yearn for a time when their own flesh will bring them comfort is something men can only feign understanding. With this need, there is an intensely female grief that accompanies the fear this life may never exist. Potential without opportunity.

Death before birth.

Lisa Cuddy is grateful for the opportunity. Whether it's luck or fate or irony she thanks God everyday and Gregory House every night.

Weeks pass as does the the middle of her first trimester. Eleven weeks to be exact, she's already made it longer than she did a year ago. Most miscarriages happen early in pregnancy.

She takes care of House and he takes care of her. His shoulder is sore for a while and she picks things up when he drops them. When Cuddy's feet ache, he rubs them. Sometimes without complaining.

They stay with each other a lot more. Neither move in but both seem to move out, a residential paradox.

Summer peaks. House hasn't returned to work yet, having somehow negotiated leave until Labor Day. She doesn't mind, the affair feels more legitimate when they forget they work together, who they are: employer and employee. He will have to return soon, though.

Some days, when he hasn't seen her in a while, House slips into the hospital, as incognito as his limp will allow and spies on her. Out of boredom, he tells himself, though there are moments he admits his vigilance.

He's always been paying attention.

One night when he's lost and alone, the TV impartial company, he thinks of the expression on Cuddy's face the day more than a year ago when he first discovered her secret.

"You keep track of my periods?"

The clever perceptive bastard did.

Strange though, that he didn't notice she had gone off the pill. Or that she was ovulating. He wonders if he really did know, subliminal clues in the back of his recently wrecked brain, losing the war against his libido. He should have known, even if he didn't.

When they finally reunite after a few days, Cuddy, exhausted from concealing her fatigue at work, falls asleep in his arms before he can utter a word. Not that he knows what to say anyway.

House isn't sure what's going on with himself. He likes seeing her at the end of the day, holding the woman puts a smile on his face. But he won't admit he's fallen in love.

It's more than responsibility or friendship or guilt on both their parts. But as badly as they want to believe everything is as it should be, that they've finally gotten something right in their miserable personal lives, a skepticism haunts them. Disbelief in what is clearly a fact but still feels like fiction.

But they never talk about it.

They don't talk about much, really. House goes on assuming she doesn't want him at doctor's appointments, and she continues attending them thinking that he doesn't want to be there. It's too early to discuss custody, child support- the legalities ugly and nauseating.

They have made an unfinished commitment, though. An incomplete pledge to their obligation. They are loyal to each other. They don't want to be with anybody but each other. They're having a baby, for real. They're all but affianced.

On a night that he's invaded Cuddy's abode without her knowing, she comes in from work and upon closing the door, winces, gripping the nearby bannister. House strides out of the shadows and across the room scaring her with an unexpected touch.

"What's wrong?" He asks tipping her chin up and checking her pupils with a practiced eye.

"Nothing," she says, a startled "God," before it.

"Except that you're sitting in my living room in the dark and uninvited."

She regrets the last word, an inappropriate adjective, and redresses,

"I didn't think you'd be here."

"Recovery is boring-"

She winces a little again, putting a hand on his shoulder. Two fingers reach for her pulse.

"What is it ?"

Cuddy moves his hand from her throat to her stomach, sliding it under the blouse. With his palm pressed to his favorite part of her body, House waits for her to say something, to describe what she's feeling but she just waits.

And then it happens.

Moving truth. Animated actual life. Existence kicking at his fingertips. It's the exhilaration of saving a life amplified a hundred fold.

A million.

It's incredibly real. Magnificently present. With the sudden awareness that he did that, House laughs.

In this moment, both forget about biology, obstetrics, science, that it's just an embryo. It's magic. Beyond comprehension, beyond definition. No textbook could describe the sensation. The gratification of creation.

They stand so long like this that Cuddy yawns. And House finally backs away, retreating to her couch.

After this, he talks to her stomach sometimes, telling it what a pretentious mom it will have and how it will need more therapy than she can afford. And he sings when the lyrics seem fitting for an expectant future that has no ears.

It's still an "it" at this point. They're weeks away from finding out the gender and it's just starting to resemble a human being. But that doesn't keep it from growing, and moving and changing everything.

They have a new secret now. One they must keep or face the consequences. She still hasn't told anyone she's pregnant, not for any particular privacy, but because other than House there's really nobody she'd tell this early. And she's glad she didn't tell anybody except Wilson last time.

Cuddy is having trouble understanding how casual they're being about the situation. How calm he is with such an inconvenience. For her, pregnancy is a tremendous abdication of control. Something inside of her that's making her sick, fat, irritable and will eventually usurp her entire life.

And somehow worth every second of it.

Though very little and obvious only to herself, she's starting to show. When she's alone, after a shower or before bed, she'll stand in front of the mirror and try to envision how big she will get.

Cuddy's probably the only woman in New Jersey ecstatic about not fitting into her clothes.

Maternity leave is another decision she must make. And who will be her temporary replacement. Her job and how it will change in unforeseeable ways a secondary anxiety. To be away from it for a while is fine, but she's not ready to relinquish the hard earned title completely.

The Dean is becoming somebody different though. The prenatal process a metamorphosis of sorts. There are two bodies, one inside the other. Two people living under one skin. So much of her life has been dedicated to maintaining her integrity, her individuality and this bodily tandem, this uncanny truth, is transforming her identity, physically.

And forever.

House is in denial of the difference. Reassuring himself that nothing has changed, not really. Not yet. Lisa Cuddy is just another one of his addictions. An almost safe habit, a prescription he's needed for years. This half dependence of theirs isn't as bewildering as he would have suspected. And he's beginning to like the new vantage.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken for granted relationship.

It's an alliance more than anything.

And a dangerous game by nature. Sleeping with the boss is one thing, with less than dynamite repercussions. Impregnating the boss, that's something else entirely. She's good at her job and he's good at his and neither one of them wants to change this much. But the moment they had gone to bed together, just to sleep, and he took her hand, everything changed.

The night of conception, it was love driven, not goal oriented. They weren't even trying. And they succeeded. Coincidences are spectacular. Sincere motives necessary.

And whether pregnancy is meticulously planned, medically coaxed or completely a surprise, one thing is certain - three lives will never be the same.

So, a few months of distracted happiness has kept the unapparent change at a distance. But now he's starting to see it. She's starting to show, just a little, something his discerning gaze is a victim of. Sometimes he wishes he weren't so observant.

_**reticent circularity**_

One day, when he's returned for clinic duty in the midst of several volunteers' resignations, he sees Cuddy's unlighted, empty office and asks the nurse where the Dean of Medicine is. He's told that she has a consult with Dr. Patrick. Recognizing the name and the lie, he vacates the clinic, leaving a patient convinced they're dying from crotch rot, and starts toward the gynecology and obstetrics department not giving a damn about the urgency he's emitting.

Barging in the examine room, House stands mute and motionless a moment seeing the panicked expression on Cuddy's face and the confused look of the ultra sound technician. Dr. Patrick comes in behind him and he says something about her 'lovely, lyrical, lilting name' (quoting Nabokov, naturally) before explaining a fictitious diagnosis to Cuddy and asking approval to start a dangerous and insane treatment.

The others appear to believe it. House stays as if he's impatiently waiting for her signature and when the doctor isn't looking, Cuddy takes his hand. They hear the heartbeat of the embryo that's become a fetus and Patrick speculates that it's a boy. House wipes the tears from her face as they meet their son, together.

When the doctor leaves the room to let Cuddy dress, button her blouse, he kisses her faintly on the lips, speechless, fingers combing through her hair in this exalted embrace.

Any doubt in the magnificence of what they've accomplished vanishes.

On the way out, House hollers something about her fallopian tubes having teeth, to keep the act up and Cuddy is left overwhelmed with the knowledge that this has suddenly become more than she could have imagined. Or ever intended.

The man isn't overwhelmed by it, because he simply hasn't accepted it yet. But he's about to. Knowing that each affectionate deed is more than an impulse now.

Knowing that when two people are under the influence of the most violent, insane, delusive, and transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in the excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. Especially when the passion is incarnate, breathing, alive -within.

House has a ring.

It is not a diamond. An heirloom he inherited, a gold band, either infinity or a very small handcuff. It was his great grand mother's and passed through the generations until his mother, married at start of the women's rights movement, insisted on a pear shaped jewel over a scrap of Dutch history. House asked his father for it when he was still with Stacy but the infarction happened before he could find the gall to ask.

Now he's retrieving it from a box under the bed with other curious keepsakes in it. Not that he's making the decision to ask, but just pushing the question to the front of the annals of his confounded conscience.

He hasn't thought about any other woman in months, though.

Their possessiveness is a most constant fidelity.

If marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open, they have been betrothed for years.

A polar attraction continually reunites them.

_**last dance**_

After work one day, Cuddy goes grocery shopping and is dumbfounded by the variety of diapers, baby formula, and other newborn necessities at her disposal.

"Back to School" supplies remind her that by the end of January she will have a baby boy. She will be a mother. And she will be alone in it.

Wandering through towers of baby clothes trying to visualize the face of their child, she suddenly suspects her medical opinion may eclipse her maternal instinct and leaves without perusing the endless aisles of the toy department, feeling prophetically alone, petrified of the prospect of permanence.

Ending up at his place, when the silence of hers it too somber, the tone of her voice is felicitous but her eyes are worried. House's head and heart are correspondingly contradictory. A dialogue interrupts their anxiety. Their uncertainty intersects.

Too restless to stand, they sit and talk, at last.

They discuss expectations, trials and tribulations. The situation they won't admit is a miracle. And miracle isn't they only 'm' word they're avoiding. Until,

"Call me old fashioned, but I was always encouraged to marry women I impregnate."

"Is that a proposal?" Cuddy asks, a girlish giggle preceding the question.

House doesn't answer or grin or laugh. She realizes he's serious.

"You don't have to marry me."

"I know," he says.

A profound beat.

Cuddy desperately wants to change the subject.

"What do you want L-" and he stops himself, "Cuddy?"

"Are we going to attempt a relationship here?

Try and make something out of it? The gift of life, sweet, screaming, pooping life."

Speechless and drowning in indecision, she sees herself as an island - with a river, a mote, an ocean between them, still alone, and terrified of building a bridge just to have it burn.

But somehow stumbles upon the right answer,

"House." Its own sentence.

"We have a relationship, we've known each other more than twenty years. Slept together. We're friends. The question is what do we do about our relationship, not if we want one."

"What do you want now?"

She shakes her head, mouthing 'I don't know' under her breath. Then she takes his hand, lacing their fingers together, a ceaseless clasp and softly says,

"This."

Late in the night when they make love House takes his time, trying to suppress his dejection. The rejection. He holds her and kisses her and tries to convince her of something he doesn't even believe himself. Silent sighs and faint moans are a sad song for this last dance.

When she comes he almost cries, knowing he may never be with her this way again - leave her breathless, share the same orgasmic continuity.

Not wanting this to be the last time, he is finally willing to do something about it.

Staring at the tiny bump that is her belly once she's sound asleep, he rolls her out of his arms and reaches for the ring. Examining it in the blue room, Greg House debates the significance gold and circles and matrimony.

Then he puts it on her finger, to see if it fits, he tells himself. Resting his head on the pillow and inhaling, he watches her wear it a while, never so grateful for the faculty of vision.

And falls asleep with a smile on his face.

Cuddy wakes before him, feeling sick, and the shine of the band reflects off of her tear filled eyes. Consternation claims her face. It's not panic or disgust but she is shocked to see it on her hand and has no idea what it means. She pulls the ring off trying to ignore how perfectly it fits and puts it on the night stand.

House watches through the corner of his eyes pretending to sleep. And as she stumbles out of bed, kissing him on the forehead and whispering 'goodbye,' the ring falls into her purse.

Neither of them ever speaking of it.

They have more on their minds than nuptials anyway. An unspoken discourse it underway, both contemplating whether they're capable of being conventional. Even if not with each other, could they one day settle into the Jersey burbs? With three kids, two cars and a bike? Could they model for family portraits year after year? Will he cut the grass while she prunes a crimson garden of American Beauties? Will they search for small change for their eager child while an ice cream truck plays "It's a Small World"?

Is this a prophecy capable of self fulfillment or just a naive pipe dream?

They're doctors, they can definitely handle the diaper changing and the potty training and the very clinical sex talk when the day comes.

But whether they are capable of being 'husband' and 'wife,' 'mommy' and 'daddy' or anything more than dean and diagnostician is still an unanswered question.

It's foolish to ever think soul mates are residing in the same zip code. But after the experience, and a pocketbook full of prostitutes, this may a fortunate alternative. They are fools, they are friends, they made this happen. Ann Arbor to Princeton, they can't escape the adduction of inevitability.

Birth is after all the sudden opening of a window, now they're looking out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. They have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.

A window for both of them, this new parental perspective brings two rebirths as well as a new life.

It is more than a window of opportunity. It's an embrasure of existence.

There will be a person, a physiological entity, a human being to represent their love. To remind them of the ineffable series of events that led to the consummation of this love.

Cause and effect, misery intervened, fate or luck or chance keeping it pure, innocent, sacred.

_**shattered glass**_

After the marriage mirage that way last night, Cuddy is still not feeling better. Her stomach hurts and out of the one thousand times she pees an hour, she notices a color she should not.

Red.

Spotting is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily an emergency, but she schedules an appointment immediately anyway.

While she is in the waiting room of this still unfamiliar department of her own hospital, Cuddy sees a woman, blonde and tall and about thirty months pregnant, coming from behind exam room doors.

And then she sees a man, the blonde woman's husband, a tall dark green eyed doctor of philosophy. Older, grayer.

Richard.

She digs into her purse, to bow her head, hide her identity, and feels a certain hormonal rage because not only is he married, with children, but he's in _her_ hospital. As she mumbles 'bastard' to herself, the fake exploration of her purse ends. She finds the ring. The damn thing followed her here. Without thinking she puts it on and approaches the nurse with pride, she _does_ run the hospital. Cuddy pretends to inquire about the patient details of the department,being a doctor, an administrator and not a patient herself.

They have an awkward meeting, she's introduced to his wife, shown pictures of their three kids, and told that she looks good. As she mentions she's pregnant, she rubs her head, so he can see the ring. When it's clear Richard regrets ever leaving her, Cuddy goes back to the exam room, feeling fantastically vindicated.

They run tests, blood, urine, a pelvic exam and an ultrasound, her name put on the top of the lab's list because she signs their paychecks. Dr. Patrick tries to calm the conspicuously nervous dean by asking if she's thinking about names for him. She says no. Everybody lies.

"I'm not interested in being Wonder Woman in the delivery room. Give me drugs," she insists as they discuss labor details, waiting for results.

Cuddy's put the ring away by now, not wanting to be congratulated on having a legitimate child by a doctor named after a nymphet. And she passes all of her tests with flying colors, being told the spotting was nothing and that some women also experience cramping during their first trimester. Usually at the beginning and not the end but that they found nothing wrong. The fetus, the endometrium, the bloodwork are all okay. She and and her son are in perfect health.

The doctor hands Cuddy a 3D ultrasound image as a consolation, a prenatal photograph of what will undoubtedly be a medical prodigy by the first grade. Cuddy expels a sigh of relief and as she leaves tells Dr. Patrick what a difficult job she has.

As an undergrad Lisa Cuddy briefly considered specializing in obstetrics. It is after all a most common concentration for female doctors. But while shadowing an obstetrician as an intern she realized how many babies she would see die- abortions, miscarriages, still births, and that despair immeasurably outweighed the joy of every baby she would see born.

The reason she became an endocrinologist.

The next day House calls, wanting to say something profound that would change everything. To let her know he's okay with whatever she decides. When she doesn't answer, he buys pickles. Bread and butter, kosher, dill, he knows that she craves them but isn't sure which variety.

The cotton candy sunburst sky of this late summer morning is inspiration. For a man without a creed, he may have found something to believe in. Now willing to admit his nihilism's defeat. House knows they're not just settling for second best. He's long been exonerated from the Stacy case. And Richard was never really the one.

On the way there, balancing five jars on his bike, the maverick diagnostician has an epiphany: that they're better than married. They're already each other's better halves, a hint of completion in an incomplete world. But without the pressure of paperwork - a tacit loyalty, a possessive fidelity. Arguments, dedication, if nothing else, they have faith in each other. One is the answer to the other's existential question - she keeps his ego from executing the destruction it's capable of and he keeps her thoroughly involved in her passion for medicine, as vicariously as it may be.

What's more is that he doesn't want her to be alone anymore, not through this, his compassion and sympathy finally cresting.

House wishes he could tell Wilson.

And children are the chance to relive childhood, recapture youth. Be forever young. Life is fleeting, old age creeping closer to both of them. It's time they nest, even if not conventionally, even if not with each other.

Getting off the bike, the clinking of the glass and knock on the door is the sound of settling.

But there's no answer.

House knocks again, a shrill noise echoing from within, he knows she's there. No footsteps follow. He drops the bag, jars breaking, horror spilling, glass shattering.

Setting a precedent for imaginary grace, he charges through the door, stuttering her name, his voice broken with fear.

Racing for her bedroom, he finds her in bed, unconscious, a colorless complexion soaked in sweat.

The alarm clock's going off. But she's not waking up.

"Lisa," slips past his lips in the plea for her to awaken.

His hands on her feverish lifeless face, unresponsive to his touch. Two lives hang in the balance and he's helpless.

This can't be happening.


	8. Palindromes

Part 8/10

VIII. Palindromes

Everybody dies.

It is a most banal conformity. An intentionally ironic 'fact of life.'

But when the inevitable happens, the body fails us, the soul's cage expires, does the consciousness remain? Floating through inner and outer space or sauntering through some Elysian Field does it complain 'I miss my life' ?

Or is death no different than birth? Are we born into identical circumstances, consciousness reunited with the same body, perpetually forced to relive every thought and every sigh, every joy and every sorrow every experience great and small, like an hourglass turning over and over again, leaving us alone to count the grains of sand?

Perhaps we are instead given this life to relive only until we are successful in it. Allowed more than one chance, endless opportunities to make the right choices, to find peace through the proper decisions. And if we never make the right choices, we are doomed to monotony, destined to live this life forever.

But who decides what's right and wrong? The teleology of our personal lives?

God? Prophets? Poets?

We do.

Fate is in our hands alone. Guided by morality, led by relationships until the distance between the origin and destination diminishes. We decide what we want, we see it but fate intercedes. It becomes an obstacle instead of a principle and the struggle is not to make the right choices but to overcome the barriers preventing us from such success.

If we forfeit, eternal return becomes fact. And life nothing more than a repeated cycle of mistakes.

-  
-

Greg House knows he's been here before. The back of an ambulance, a woman's life in his hands. Choices, chances, accidents the only reason for it all.

"Are you the husband?" A paramedic asks.

He nods, looking at Cuddy's limp defenseless body prostrate on the stretcher when he says, "yes," and tells them she's nearly five months pregnant.

House watches her vitals, brushes her hair out of her face, afraid of touching her. He is thinking of the hormone shots he once gave her and how she had almost asked him. How badly she had wanted this then and how much he wants it now. Feeling tremendously guilty for not being with her more, not asking her to move in, to take constant care of her the way she did for him, he knows he was taking it all for granted.

It's he who is regretting not asking a question now.

A mind convoluted with connections, consequences, already considering the love they created has been carried away. That it's all coming to an abrupt and expected end. He can feel his objectivity diminishing. Care, concern, worry consuming him, and as badly as he wants to suppress it all, as much as he knows he needs to, he can't.

"Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital," he says after the first mile, not knowing what he's done wrong but certain this is all his fault.

Once there, House finds and harasses Dr. Patrick for her incompetence but when he's told Cuddy had just been to see her, with no apparent complications, he returnsto his office.

And to his job.

_**dr awkward**_

House studies her file thoroughly, paying closer attention to the most recent visits, and doesn't see anything out of the ordinary on the test results.

He writes,

_Bleeding__  
Fever__  
Loss of consciousness  
Pregnancy_

on the white board.

The team is assembled and approaching it as a threatened miscarriage, the differential begins:

Foreman: Cuddy's pregnant, since when?

House: She started the first cycle of IVF more than a year ago.

Taub: Progesterone deficiency. Treatable. Was she on medication?

House: No.

Kutner: You didn't even look at the file.

House: I memorize all my boss's medical histories. I'm the ideal employee.

Foreman: Why did you know she was pregnant before anyone else?

House shakes his head. Straining,

House: She asked me to look at donors' histories.

Kutner: Cervical infection could explain fever and bleeding.

House: Check for uterine malformation, fibroids, or cervical problems. And placenta abruption.

Hadley: Polycystic ovary syndrome. Half of pregnancies in women with PCOS are miscarried in the first trimester. Metformin can lower the risk of miscarriage if she has PCOS.

House: She's healthy. Tested before she began the IVF.

And in her second trimester, now.

Taub: High blood pressure, rubella, chlamydia all increase the risk of miscarriage.

House: Cuddy does not have chlamydia.

Taub: How can you be sure?

House: Because we slept together two days ago.

Frustrated it comes off as sarcastic, but with no mention of bondage they don't know what to believe.

Kutner: Age. Miscarriage becomes a greater risk the older the parents are.

House shakes his head, ignoring the insult.

House: She wouldn't have carried this long. And she has a temperature of 103, that's not a symptom of old age.

Hadley: Severe cases of hypothyroidism increase the risk of miscarriage. Could be autoimmune.

House: No preexisting thyroid condition. But test for APS and lupus anyway.

Foreman: Pre eclampsia.

House: BP's fine, no pre eclampsia.

Hadley: Has she miscarried before?

House: No.

Taub: Caffeine consumption has been correlated to miscarriage rates, is she a coffee drinker?

House: She'd have to swallow a Starbucks.

Hadley: Hypoperfusion, the fetus is basically a parasite stealing nutrients - vitamins and minerals from the mother.

House: Start telemetry. Rerun all the tests her OB did.

They leave, House stands at the white board. Set adrift on memory's bliss, all he can do to keep his mind from anarchy. The beach, the bathtub, being mistaken for husband and wife. Their beautiful baby boy that he knows will have his mother's eyes. All vividly rushing forth making the involuntary transformation evident.

Feeling their child move changed him. Even in a more profound way than Amber's death. New life has a strange was of negating misery, mistakes, destruction. Birth and death are not two different states, but different aspects of the same state. For the beginning and end of a circle meet in the same place. But every new beginning is another beginning's end.There was a time when Greg House thought life and death were meaningless, that there's as little reason to deplore the one as there is to be pleased over the other.

But everything has changed. Suddenly, permanently and without his consent.

House keeps recalling her lying in his bed. Cuddy's hair fanned across a pillow, the smell of him on her, the empty space she filled so perfectly.

He has to see her.

On the way to her room he struggles to remember if he noticed any symptoms the last night they were together, but all he think of is her smile and her stomach and the ring. She's like no woman he's been with before, an equal, inimitable, not a mistress and more than a wife.

As he enters her room, the flicker of fluorescence is conquered by the sun, blue and white and the end of summer backlighting her.

House kneels down next to her. Her feverish breath quickens and she lets out a weak moan. Pressing his face to hers, he whispers calm words into her sleep. It's more than sympathy or vigilance, and it's not doing anything to solve the mystery, but he feels compelled to be at her side, to inspirit her, to do anything but leave her alone.

After a while her breathing returns to normal and Cuddy's face rises unconsciously to meet his. Smelling the aroma of her fever, he breathes it in as if trying to glut himself with the intimacy of her body.

And all at once he imagines they've known each other longer. In a different life. That they've been together like this forever. Existentially betrothed. Married. Or tied by bonds beyond their control, forced or meant or chosen to be together.

It is the only connection he can see now, science becomes secondary.  
Medicine the most mediocre coincidence.

House has a sudden clear feeling that he will not surviveher death. Or their child's. He wants to lie down beside her and die with them. It would be his pleasure, his privilege. He brings Cuddy's limp ringless hand to his lips and keeps it there a long time.

Is this a blasphemous exaggeration or unconditional love finally declaring itself to him? Is it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, feels the self deluding need to simulate it?

House is too objective to be hysterical, but not objective enough anymore- to cure her. Or to not love. Her, and their child.

Once upon a dream, an unplanned, absurdly destined dream, a long wished for girl, a beloved bride, a sleeping beauty lay like this in a great fortress, not unlike a hospital. Under a terrible curse, she fell into a somber slumber for a hundred years, until her true love awakened her with a kiss.

House knows he's not a prince. That this isn't an adventure, it's another case. No fable but a nightmare.

And the ferocious fire breathing dragon he cannot find or diagnose, let alone slay.

But the shine of summer's persuasive rays brings a glimpse of confidence. Her regal majestic form enchanted with something more than beauty. With the spectacle of another life. House can't cower away. He must retrieve the sword of science and continue searching for the malevolent monster that's doing this to her.

The firefight begins.

_**wow**_

Cursed slumber becomes a coma. The fever an incessant oppression. House paces in his office, feeling infinite grief and loneliness, heartbroken and incomplete.

Taub: Tests came back, it's not autoimmune or hypoperfusion.

House: Has to be an infection then.

Foreman: They tested her on admission for every-

House: Test again! Something is causing her fever, something

has the baby in distress.

Taub: Fetus.

House realizes the slip in his semantics, his objectivity.

Kutner: Chromosomal abnormalities. What do we know about the donor?

House holds his breath, seeing how it connects, trying to ignore the possibility.

This is all his fault.

House: Donors are tested.

Foreman: They test for common things. Could be something less common, Tay-Sachs or Emmanuel...

House shakes his head, considering.

Hadley: Maternal mirror syndrome, you had a case before.

House writes it on the board.

Kutner: Genetic problems are more likely to occur with older parents.

House: Let's assume her donor was some young, virile, healthy guy, just in the need of a few bucks, okay?

Kutner picks up her file when House finally puts it down.

Taub: What if the pregnancy's irrelevant? If the fetus isn't doing this to her then...

Foreman: She was bleeding, had abdominal pain, I doubt the pregnancy has nothing to do with that.

Hadley: Trauma?

House shakes his head, knowing she hasn't done any heavy lifting .

Foreman: Hyperemesis gravidarum, it's rare but...

House: She wasn't vomiting. Morning sickness subsided around the middle of her first trimester.

All four look at him, wondering why he knows this.

House: What? It's in her file - she stopped getting medication for the morning sickness, therefore it stopped.

Kutner: It says here she had a miscarriage sixteen months ago. Chemical pregnancy, happened a few weeks after implantation.

House: What?

More a lament than a question.

Hadley: You didn't know?

House shakes his head, biting his bottom lip.

Taub: If she had a miscarriage then, it's probably some inherent defect with her-

House: It's not.

Silence.

Nobody understands House's refusal of the most obvious explanation. Why he's being less objective- then,

Taub: If the baby's doing this to her, we may have to terminate.

House: We don't even know what's wrong! Termination is not an option.

Stale air. A speechless room of doctors responsible fore saving their boss. And her child.

Hadley: Is it too early to induce labor?

Foreman nods, Houser rubs his face, takes a handful of vicodin. Thirteen sighs, nobody certain what to suggest. A clock ticks, the tennis ball drops, something unforeseen but inevitable draws closer. And,

Kutner: No lemon, no melon.

House: I'm sorry, fruit is relevant how?

Kutner: I had a professor in med school, one day he came in,wrote 'nolemonnomelon' on the board turned the letters into the shape of a vertical hairpin, with the palindrome halved and the same letters facing each other.

Blank confounded faces.

Kutner: The point of the exercise was to explain the concept of palindromic hairpins in the human genome. Genetic palindromes are a structural flaw in the genome that makes certain chromosomes prone to breakage; this instability, the rearrangement, or translocation, has been linked to mental retardation and physical anomalies. And chromosonal abnormalities are the reason for most miscarriages. Especially when conceived using ART methods like IUI or IVF. But this isn't something they test for.

House: Thirteen, go find out if her donor has any more sperm laying around. So we can test and find out which rare genetic disorder Cuddy's baby has.

Taub: And an HCG, in case she already lost it?

House pauses, not breathing at the possibility. Then,

House: Taub's right, do another ultrasound and run a serial human chorionic gonadotropin test. Find out if the fetus is viable. See if he's still alive.

Foreman, Taub, and Kutner leave but Thirteen is last.

Hadley: He?

House nods trying to conceal the concern, the conspicuous attachment, she walks out, starting to suspect.

House stands in his office alone a while. Too disgusted to dig for any more vicodin. He's not the hero after all. More likely the curse. The spindle she pricked her finger on dooming her to the wrong destiny. Inevitable, prophesied. The ailment- _he's_ what's done this to her.

He goes to her room again and bows beside her bed, his eyes begging for forgiveness. But he can't stay angry at the setting sun. Everybody gets tired eventually, sometimes there's nothing left to do but sleep.

The room is a garden, blossoming with color, floral condolences from everybody who knows she's here. At the sight of a flower withering beside her bed, House blinks away a tear, embarrassed by its honesty.

Seeing her now, he can't replace this immaculate victim with a memory anymore. He'd prefer to remember her smiling face, not this atrocity, this wreck that's taken it's place.With one hand in hers, the other on her stomach he whispers inaudible and between stifled sobs to both of them, begging her to awaken, pleading for a diagnosis, letting her know if they go he will soon follow.

Heaven or hell, different names for the same thing. The darkness they've been trying to escape, he would sacrifice light, all light to follow her into these unknown shadows.

Opaque nothingness.

Wanting this horrible reversal of fortune to be a bad dream, he kisses her softly on the lips, but the spell isn't broken.

The futility of hope, a final failure.

But he won't let himself cry or grieve, just brood in quiet desperation, with the heartfelt longing for 'mom' and 'dad' to be the only palindromes confronting them still. House knows if he loses the race to chase this light, catch the light, it will be the forfeiture of everything in exchange for nothing.

Feeling so hapless he can't even touch her anymore, House retreats to a corner of the room like a chess piece, delivered there against his will, just a pawn in a game he can't possibly win.

The sweet breath of time whispers its own truth, leaving him a certain number of its hours and minutes to prepare for imminent loss. He's trying to rationalize, think what else could be doing this to her, then he decides what he must do.

Thirteen comes in.

Hadley: There's no record of Cuddy restarting the IVF, she stopped a year ago after the third cycle and the chemical pregnancy. No donor's are...

House: Records must be wrong.

He mumbles, not looking at her, reaching for a syringe.

Finally,

Hadley: It's yours isn't it?

Choking on his alibi, House doesn't answer. He sits and ties a tourniquet around his arm.

House: Test me.

Hadley: But if it's genetic, if it is palindromic DNA... There's nothing we can do.

House squints, tears building behind his eyes, and brings the needle and her reluctant hand to a vein without breathing.

House: I know.

She draws the blood, nervously- wishing she weren't such an unlucky number, or in this position. When she's done,

House: Thirteen. You don't tell anybody my secret and I won't tell anybody yours.

Uncertain how he knows, she nods and leaves them alone again.

House gazes at Cuddy's delicate, pale, pregnant body and can only see its strength. She was prepared to do it all alone. Willing to sacrifice so much for him, for this new life. An endless aching need he now possesses.

On his way back to his office, House feels like he doesn't belong, like the ground's not his, that he's walking on. That he doesn't deserve to be here, if this is his fault, he should be paying for it, not her. She's suffered for so many of his mistakes, risked her job, jeopardized everything for the man so many times. That loyalty has cost her so much. And she doesn't do it just because she trusts him, or because he's the best doctor in her hospital but because she loves him, she always has and she will never stop.

It should be him in that hospital bed, not her and their innocent child.

As his objectivity wanes, House decides he doesn't want to die with her, but for her. Instead of her. That he deserves as much. Amber, Wilson it's all too unfair for him to keep victimizing his enablers. The selfishness, his arrogance, his lack of compassion have diminished though. Cuddy and the pregnancy this entire summer have all changed him. Except he doesn't believe people can change. Still, he's suffering with her. Any loss of hers will be his own.

Awaiting test results, Cuddy slips deeper into solemn sleep. Peaceful, patient, resting until she is rescued.

House staggers into his office, wishing the compassion hadn't consumed him. For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. And he's experiencing it to the second power.

Taub: New blood cultures revealed septicemia.

House: MRI her head.

Kutner: We did. Found inflammation of the membranes and fluid surrounding the brain.

House: Meningitis?

Kutner nods, Thirteen enters the office.

Hadley: It's not genetic.

House: I know.

But not relieved.

Foreman: It has to be viral or bacterial.

Taub: And isn't being caused by the pregnancy.

House: Start her on broad spectrum antibiotics. Test her blood for any infections pregnant women are prone to get, that we haven't tested for already.

_**reviver**_

Greg House is beginning to understand the man that shot him. The father. And the reason he shot him. To save his child, his own flesh.

A future.

Selfish selflessness. An intelligible lie beneath an unintelligible truth.

For a moment he thinks about his own father, wondering why paternal protection isn't universal. He would do anything for his son now. And anything for her, though she's not his wife.

It doesn't matter.

He'd die. Take another round of lead and shrapnel.

Anything.

But all he has to do is find what's killing her. Them. He has to regain his objectivity. Be a doctor and not a dad, a diagnostician and not an indecisive bridegroom. Her employee, not her lover.

The office hurts, a reminder of how much Cuddy has given him, so he wanders a while, as transient as life itself. Ending up in the pediatric ward, he knows nobody will look for him here, and doesn't want to be found in worsening circumstances.

House is affected by the laughter of children. The resilience of that laughter. Blithe and bold, youth's souls in delight. Sick and dying, innocent and free, every child's death is a poetic injustice - to life, to science, to this hospital.

When it becomes too much, he retreats to the cafeteria, a room empty like his heart. A room with all the windows shattered, broken glass and blighted hope, their love lies bleeding in the shards of what remains. So little left to lose, he's trying to hold on. But it's slowly slipping away.

"If there's anyone I would trust to save my baby, it would be Dr. House."

Cuddy's confidence haunts him now. So much that he can almost hear her voice. And now he's facing the loss of this companion, his only partner. The last person who believes in him. Left alone again with guilt, pain, pills.

In spite of their tacitly laid plans, the unspoken promise, their silent vows, the dependency is overwhelming, obscuring the facts. Nuptials of reliance, all they had was each other and even this may not be true anymore.

Though House may not be liable for the disease he is still responsible for saving her. Even if he does solve the puzzle though, he may not be able to prescribe the experimental or dangerous treatment that it requires. He has to detach himself somehow, stop caring.

Think about her the way he did before any of this.

The memories are black and white now. Of the mundane but enlightening sight of a pregnant Lisa Cuddy crying through a movie. Of Stella Dallas. Of all the events that drew them to each other's arms. Of holding her hair back, of linking legs together and of take out.

Knowing what's at stake, the meaning of his life, medicine and its diagnostic mysteries, he tries to remember an elusive symptom, make the connection that nobody else can, but all he can think of is sitting on her couch, watching her watch a movie, imagining how far her life is from where she wants it to be, eating take out.

With this he realizes that maybe his life has a new meaning now. A different aspect he can no longer deny. More responsibility than curing strangers. Their dependency, their reliance, their child, has usurped the meaning of his life. Redefined it completely. So he stops resisting it, finally willing to admit he's okay with with this woman and her child, black and white movies and take out.

And then it comes.

The epiphany, the revelation, the return of his objectivity. The weight of guilt lifted, the chase for light over. So obvious, so easy.

He races to her room, wishing Cuddy would have cooked that night.

House: Start her on Ampicillin. It's Listeria.

Explains the fever, meningitis, everything.

Foreman: And the bleeding.

Hadley: Food poisoning?

Taub: Which we didn't test for.

House: Test the amniotic fluid, see if the fetus is infected.

They obey and start her on IV Ampicillin. Cuddy's fever subsides, the others leave.

Two beating hearts find an audibly synchronous union, Gregory House never so relieved by the sight and sounds of an EKG. He goes to her side, strange emotions mounting, anxiety replaced by pride, the cure, he hesitates because the door's open but eventually takes her hand.

After a while, Cuddy stirs and starts to open her eyes. As her lips part to speak, her blood pressure drops, vitals failing, the EKG jumps unregulated, each wave's apex touching the ceiling. His heart plummets, she flatlines at his fingertips.

Chaos. House hollers for a crash cart.

And suddenly he's in the same position she was once. A defibrillator paddle in each hand. A friend's life hinging on the suppression of emotion, reliance on science. On complete detachment.

Maybe it will always be this way.

Cuddy's watched him die so many times, now he's watching her die, the unconquerable pang of tangible loss. Seeing hearing, knowing she's left him.

It is a supreme unparalleled love to witness each other's death.

He understands now how she must of felt every time herisked his life. Stubborn or driven or stupid, it was never for as honorable a cause as this. But she saved, rescued, brought him back to life time and time again.

He checks her airway, breathing, and pulse. Gives her epinephrin in case it's an allergic reaction to the antibiotics. Charges the defibrillator.

Once. Twice. Three times. He shocks the departed body, a dire plea, heroic effort, the kiss to awaken her.

Return.

A beep,a wave,a heartbeat. Echoes of success. Unbounded music. Pulse, tone, the sound of a future, reverberations of hope. A heartbeat. A soul. A life.

But only one.

--

/

/

A/N:Please forgive any medical inaccuracies this is meant to be dramatic, philosophical, even not  
scientifically sound. Also, please keep reading, I've decided that in addition to the ending I originally intended this story will have an _**alternate ending**_ as well. Ten chapters instead of nine.

Thanks for reading. Please review.


	9. August and Everything After

Part 9/10 This is the ending I originally intended but, there will be an **_alternate ending_**

Please read, review compare contrast both. Thanks

IX. August and Everything After

Forwards, backwards, it's all the same. Life is a palindrome. Experiential recurrence. Inevitable motifs, chances, fortuities, accidents happen. And happen again.

For Lisa Cuddy it is an ending the same as the beginning, the absence of life, the adversary of infertility. Miscarriage now because of miscarriage then. The injustice of existence and the force of its symmetry.

Standing at one side of her hospital bed, House is recognizing the absurdity, the ridicule, the ugliness of coincidences.

Five months earlier he went to a bar, called Wilson, Amber _happened_ to answer, a life was lost because of the coincidence. He nearly lost his own life three times, but Cuddy _happened_ to be there, gave him mouth to mouth, brought him back to life. If she hadn't been there, he may not be alive, Amber would still be dead, and Cuddy never pregnant.

Five months earlier Cuddy kissed him, and he took her hand, and they slept beside each other. But this only _happened_ because she didn't get pregnant sixteen months before, if she had, they would not have fallen into each other's arms. But because of that absence of a life (infertility) and the loss of a life (Amber) a life was saved and a life created. House _happened_ to get shot because a man's daughter was dying. And Cuddy miscarried because they _happened _to order take out. A life saved, a life lost. A life lost, a life saved.

Absurd is an understatement. Life and death are quantitative misgivings on a scale with a bias for subtraction, not addition. With a ruthless requisite for certain symmetry. Recurring balance.

So many fateful decisions resting on so fortuitous a love, a love that would not have existed if by _coincidence_ they did not meet at Michigan. A love they would never have had the circumstances to recognize or consummate if House hadn't _happened _to have the infarction, years earlier.

Decades since this all started, it leaves him in a strange state of melancholy realizing how much of it is only a matter of chance. The entire realm of love, life and death with infinite possibilities and impossibilities, dependent on choices they had no choice but to make.

Staring at her beautiful body he sees now the stigma of his own mistakes. And feels that maybe he should just have stayed out of her life completely.

The number of years they have both spent pursuing lost moments seems impossible. He feels old, sick but somehow certain this pursuit will continue. They will keep trying to recapture something they never had a hold on in the first place. Fools, friends, just trying to make it happen. Again.

Lisa Cuddy is still asleep, unaware of her loss, the fever dream is becoming more a vision of unrealized possibility.

It is her wedding day.

In an orchard, a grove on an endless, magnificently green meadow, she steps slowly through abstracted air. The sun is lingering in the east illuminating wreathed and dewy rows of trees and shining down the quiet aisle between the bride and her groom. In an elegant ivory gown with a full skirt, long train, mounds of tulle and exquisite lace she moves with confidence, with no hesitation toward the man. A stranger.

The distance between she and this unfamiliar stature gradually diminishes but his details remain shrouded in flowers fresh as an April shower followed by a lovely spring day could make them. Red, pink, yellow roses. Baby's breadth. Lilies and clover. Dandelions at her bare feet. Doves soar in splendor overhead, the cloudless sky a tranquil shade of blue.The music, the only thing she can hear other than beat of her excited heart is the song of birds in the tree tops. There are no guests at this wedding only these two souls, adorned in the purest white.

The altar is an arch lined with ivy, and suddenly aware of how alone she is in this path, she realizes she has no control over the speed of her stride. Satisfied still, knowing reunion is inevitable. The intoxicating floral perfume inspirits her as she continues the journey, trying to identify the groom. There is no cane, and as she slowly bridges the gap she can see his cravat is black. A half blown rose in the pleat of his jacket is crimson, above his heart.

Hands are the only part of him she sees. And though they tremble a little, the motion is not what steals her attention. The ring in his grasp is gold. Infinity, purity, and he's passing it on to her. It is a gift more than a commitment. There's a strange perpetual permanence about the ceremony but it doesn't really feel like marriage. Lifting the veil, he kisses her to confirm the completion and it's such a placid, listless embrace that she opens her eyes. And sees him, at last.

House.

His eyes the same lucid hue as the sky, his lips fervid and familiar on hers. It is comfort, it is success somehow.

It is just a dream.

But dreaming is not merely an act of coded communication, it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened- is the most universal necessity.

And this dream is beautiful, eloquent, it will not be forgotten, which makes it dangerous.

The dream revealed what she really wants, and she can not run from it, she will hold onto it. She will want to have the dream again, night and day will compete for her heart, reminding Cuddy of what she needs, until she admits it. Until she pursues it.

Until the dream is reality.

Standing still, House isn't facing her, but looking out the glass door into an empty hallway. Rain is drowning the world outside theses walls, a dismal summer deluge. Paralyzed by the static sound of the downpour, he stares straight ahead until he sees the movement of her reflection on the glass when she awakens.

"House," she says to his hand clutching the cane.

He turns around reluctantly. Afraid of looking at her. Not wanting any of this to be true.

"You're in the ICU."

"Why?

What is it?"

The levity of a dream sinks into the burden of fact,

"Listeriosis."

"No... "

Impending tears brim, her weak utterance wavers.

Is the baby...?"

House closes his eyes to shake his head, incapable of saying the words.

Cuddy's head collapses into her hands. A quiet voice in her head whispers, 'This was your greatest fear. It's happening.' She feels numb, guilty, alone, so alone.

But she isn't.

"I... " He starts.

"I'm so sorry."

She hears him but doesn't make a sound. House can't cry, dying is fine but it should have been him.

They spend a long forever in silence. The solemnity of sorrow slowly burying the both of them. A warm hand runs down her arm and wet fingers weave together. House swallows his own sobs, trying to be a pillar, a friend, the compassionate doctor that he's not.

As he gently rubs her palm Cuddy struggles to understand why everything is ending the way it started. One of them at the other's bedside, holding hands, a death and its destruction looming over. Guilt blanketing all other emotions.

All of their progress disappearing before them.

"House," as their clasp disconnects.

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," he says with the sincerity and conviction of a diagnosis.

As he stands beside her, aphonic and broken, he feels something he has never felt before. The compassion is warring with his objectivity, their only common thread is his loyalty,to his job, to her.

But in this moment neither is enough.

Cuddy's soul is lost again. Hidden beneath the residue of defeat. Obscured by absurdity, murdered by an unjust intervention. Some part of both of them has died. They've died together. A shared future extinguished. Potential, expectation stolen. They wanted more, they could have had so much more. They were so close, so elevated. Lightness in a somber world of clumsy physics.

_**it's not the fall that kills you (it's the sudden stop)**_

Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to experience vertigo. But vertigo is something more than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below that tempts and lures us. It is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

And now two separate souls are free falling from the greatest heights they've ever known. The summit they finally found the courage to climb together. Their worst fear is before them.

House's powerlessness is his insuperable longing to fall. A man living in a constant state of vertigo, plagued by cynicism and suspicion. The expectation of falling. He was waiting for the loss, the disappointment but thought it would come in the form of her rejection of his proposal, of him, and never this.

They are plummeting into bottomless black, an uncertain abyss, the ground imperceptible, the air angry, the devastation of landing imminent. A fall into cold empty space, the culmination of all gravity, all pain. The light of day lost.

A fall after which nothing will be the same.

Anger is the dominant emotion for them both, initially. Cuddy doesn't understand why she was allowed to get this far, this close, just to have it end. Happiness was in sight, completion near, but fate taunts her. The same as it did with Richard, the same as it did more than a year before this. It's as if each consecutive blow is intensified, magnified exponentially, added to the potency of all the others, testing her strength, how much weight she can bear before breaking completely.

But life is a persistent window. She has been allowed to look through this window twice, certainly she can't resign now aware of it's an attainable perspective. Knowing she created life she saw it, felt it move, heard its heartbeat and she can again.

The thought of another miscarriage has always brought a premonition of anesthetized gloom but the idea of _never_ having a child gives her an overwhelming sense of despair, as much grief as another inadvertent failure. Lisa Cuddy is not ready to give up yet.

Guilt is plaguing her in a way it hasn't since the infarction. She will blame herself for ordering take out, when she knew sheshouldn't have. She will blame herself for going home, believing nothing was wrong. She will blame herself for choosing such an incompetent doctor. But she will not blame House for not curing her sooner. Even if she had died, she could not unlove him. In fact, somewhere in her celestial enlightenment she would love him all the more, for giving her the opportunity to be pregnant, a mother, to create life before her own death.

No, House she still loves, it is herself who Cuddy now despises.

He is just as angry. Furious with himself. Cursing a God he doesn't believe in for being such an indian giver. House mourns in his own way, stays at a distance while the infection loses to science. Neither wants anybody to suspect, especially now.When it's time, he discreetly schedules her D and C, never so nauseated by two letters.

The day of the procedure he's apprehensive for her. His compassion still has yet to dissipate completely. She's having it alone, he knows and is restless at the thought of it. In his office, memory is his sole companion, their briefest bliss now only in his imagination. And then he remembers, it's not.

It's in his wallet.

A kiss. Tangible proof of what they had, what they nearly had. He pulls out the picture from the photobooth. Their wedding portrait. A kiss. Black and white, shades of gray, dull tonalities in a now colorless world. A monument to time past. A kiss. A private continuation of the affair, a hymn to their still unrequited love, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story as it disappears in the distance. Each frame reanimates their potential, revives their passion, it makes it real again, visible, unmistakable.The shape of her smile, the light in her eyes, his lips on her cheek, it was so perfect, so right.

And before he feels another pang of loss, House stands andstarts toward outpatient surgery.

The waiting room is crowded and House is disguised as a concerned loved one, legs crossed, a magazine in front of his face. He sees her shoes when she steps out and treads unevenly, but not far behind.

Once she's outside, alone and overwhelmed by this horrific ending, a sob escapes, her bottom lips quivers, but the flow of the pain from her eyes is interrupted when she's startled by his limping frame at her side. Cuddy starts to walk away speechless, heartbroken, not wanting to believe any of this is true. It is all just some awful nightmare, she will wake up soon.It started when she fell asleep, she has to wake up.

As summer's sweat streams into inevitable tears, she looks back at him through the corner of her eye, silently begging him to follow. The hot pavement of the parking lot spurns their feet and the sun, the season makes this hell more than anything. House drives her home, both mute, confused- everything but alone in the car as an unforgiving reality stalks close.

The quiet façade of Cuddy's strength disintegrates when they arrive at her doorstep. As House reaches to rest a hand on her back, to say something, though he knows not what, she turns around and buries her face into his shoulder, weeping softly. With one arm around her waist, and the other stroking her head, each tear is a reinforcement of his failure. He kisses her high on one cheek, his nose pressed to her hair and when her sobs subside he pulls away quickly, resisting the temptation to kiss her again. And again.

"You can always try again," he whispers.

And she knows it's not optimism or a platitude, he's answering the question that started all of this, the question she never asked.

They almost forget the struggle in this embrace, a composed compassionate hug was how this all started and it is how it must end. It's warm, it's refuge.

But it doesn't last.

The silent release ends, separating them again. Cuddy turns toward the door, digging for her keys. And she finds it. Gold, ardor, infinity - at the bottom of her purse. A sardonic smile almost steals her mouth at the dissonance of the rediscovery. For an instant the wedding dream flashes forth but, jaded by such naive hope, she reaches a hand out to give it back.

Staring at the gold between her fingers, House doesn't blink or consider,

"Keep it."

It is a gift.

No romantic gesture, only a shared sense of beauty in the purity, the simplicity of a ring. A remedy to cure her depression and imbue this anguished woman with a new will to live. Tepid teardrops fall from her smiling face, it is a strange redemption to hear his voice echoing in her consciousness, inscribed on her soul.

Two words with more meaning than the three they could never say.

With no goodbye, he feels it is impossible to leave her, even for a little while. They're running against the years, their past, toward a bleak future by themselves. It is a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, urging him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house now—and say "This is forever."

But one foot in front of the other, without looking back, he goes. They have been with other people, they will be with other people. But they will always return to each other. Their relationship is the last palindrome they will know. Their fidelity is a recurring refusal to ever let the other be defeated.

_**almost**_

They will cope, they will recover, they will eventually see how everything has changed. It is still a secret. But they will never forget that once they got something right, both nearly died to save a life both are alive and still chasing the light.

House returns to his office, downs the contents of his vicodin bottle with the remainder of the bourbon bottle. He may die from medication, but at least he'll kill the pain. Time doesn't heal such wounds, he knows. Miscarriage is still bereavement, it never goes away. He's a realist, he knows this isn't the end of some tragic love story, it's life.

It _was_ life.

His son lived, his son died. He lost, and he tried. The pregnancy was an accident, like everything else. But even House, as calloused, abrasive and solitary as he may be, feels robbed. He wants to recover something, some idea of himself that was stolen by all of this. By the same chance that gave him the idea in the first place. His life will not be the same until he finds it.

Trying to connect the nubs and voids of the puzzle of his recent past, he's detaching himself from it slowly. He still thinks this is all his fault, detachment is all that's keeping him from willing his heart to stop beating.

Color blind now, the absence of life subtracts the entire spectrum one shade at a time, until there is nothing but an abominable lack of color. Until there is nothing left worth seeing. Not without desperation he has long felt the failures in his profession dissolving into a lifeless mass.

He will never forgive himself.

Because just this once he has pandered to the last and greatest of human dreams; a transitory enchanted moment of holding his breath, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor recognized, face to face for the first time with something commensurate to his capacity for knowledge, for connection- a life. One he created. The significance of all else seems dim and fading quickly before his eyes.

Still he is trying to decipher the underlying reason for it all. Why the number three taunts him. A number so frequent in his life, now he's being denied it. It could have been the three of them, in some formation, conventional, official or not.

He was nearly a father, something more than a limp and an ego, something more than a doctor and manipulative bastard. But there's no 'I' in threesome. Maybe his concern, this robbed feeling is just his selfishness, his pride. A part of the man literally died.

But it was their tern.

More than 'if' or 'what if' the most prevalent possibility motif for Greg House is 'almost.' He almost had something more than this tennis ball, and that white board. He almost had a snapshot of a ternate and unexpected future. He almost asked a question that would change three lives forever. He almost confronted and conquered his nihilism, some element of loneliness that made it so easy to be loved, so hard to love.

'Almost' is all he has left.

A window has closed.

An embrasure of existence extinct, what nearly fell in place has fallen apart. With every sip, every pill he draws further and further into himself, preparing to give up. But the dead dream fights on as the day slips away, trying to touch what is no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. An empty windowless room, with no view but four blank, black walls.

But perhaps an opening of another kind has been created.A threshold with a knob and a keyhole, a door on the interior wall of this claustrophobic chamber. And though they have no idea what is on the other side, they now possess the key to opening this door.

A gold key, a round key, an honest key.

They did this, which means it's possible. They can do it again. Refuse to be discouraged by this change in plans, by their deviated destinies. House is willing and Cuddy never really intended for any of this to happen the way it did. She was going to restart the IVF and doesn't want to stop now. The woman simply can't resign the lifelong aspiration of convention - of a child and a husband. She can still ask him.

She _has_ to ask him.

They can open this door at any time.

But the door is not opportunity without obstacle. Passing through it will not be easy, especially together. They have to unlock the door for each other, cross it with each other, find the courage to face whatever may be on the other side. Rejection, failure or sweet new life. House is reconsidering the symmetrical composition of all the lives effected by this strange series of events. Such a ridiculously convoluted machine that Rube Goldberg could not have devised a more indirect way of arriving at this destination,this very moment. He's beginning to see it all very clearly.

Questioning if it is fate who has made a mistake, an irreconcilable blunder. Perhaps Cuddy did not miscarry now only because she did then, perhaps the symmetry is coincidence, that the life they created, against all odds, lived and was meant to live to create another symmetry. To balance the life lost that was Amber Volakis, An asymmetrical flaw in the scenario of three lives. A life created to negate this mistake, to reestablish equilibrium, to right a wrong.

To give long sought happiness and endless joy to his mother and grant amnesty for his father's treason. Absolution of sins. Erasure of mistakes. Reward and forgiveness.

It was another chance.

Maybe there will be another still. The repetition may work in their favor eventually. Maybe they will live, be together until they get this right.

The end has no end.

Each opposition, each failure is just a catalyst, cementing their commitment, their loyalty, their dedication to each other, to this dream. And they'll keep their levels, fulfill their promises, somehow be buoyed up by the inevitability of success or at least distracted from their strife by trying.

Happiness is a light that casts no shadows in the aftermath of some especially intense misery. And he was happy. Somehow after the bus crash, after everything. And with her.

Life belies when there's nothing to believe in. Truth begins in lies. If truth is his only credence, he needs her, a child, something more than this. And so does she. They have so little, have been denied so much. House had to lose this vantage to realize how much he wanted it. Now the cruel summer's sun sets and a part of him is missing.

Probability, possibility, necessity. Choice, chance, expectation. The return of his objectivity makes the prospect of reunion skewed. Both are lost again, scarred. Regret is what they are left with, no hope and little grace. But of all the things they possess in common, the only one that matters at all is the corresponding space they fill in each other's hearts. The struggle to fill this space seems the only thing worth while. Or so a mind muses, at night. Alone.


	10. Lies, Love and Presence Without Pain

_Sorry that this took an extra week to finish. I got sick and just couldn't focus.  
In my defense, it is a rather long chapter. Also I would like to encourage suggestions/requests for new H/C stories, and just to make friends. Feel free and comment/pm with me any.  
I hope you enjoy this ending. Please let me know what think. Thanks for reading!_

**Alternate Ending**: _Remember, this picks up at the end of Chapter 8_

--.--.--.--.--.--.--

X. Lies, Love and Presence without Pain

One thought, two souls, three hearts, one pulse.

The defibrillator paddles fall but the metallic heat rises, scalding Houses hands. Panicked, his fingers find and adjust the fetal monitor. Fearing nothing more than this loss, with the motion ofhis wrists there's a sinking regret, a prophetic despair. All he can think is 'I'm sorry (for everything)'

And then, as if the apology recompenses it all, each mistake all the blunders of his life, it returns- an algorithm.

A heartbeat. A soul.

His baby boy.

Keeping his mother alive as much as she's keeping him alive.

House finally breathes, realizing he hasn't since the start of this resuscitation- of himself, some previously pulseless, long-buried part of an ordinary man. The rise and fall of Cuddy's chest, the beating heart in her belly instills in him the most relief he's ever felt. The electricity is still stinging the tips of his fingers when he sits, never taking his eyes off the monitors.

_**a dream and a memory**_

For a long time Cuddy sleeps still, the fever slowly recessing.

Lost, she is somewhere between a memory and a dream. On a long, level, isolated stretch of the whitest sand, a beach she stands alone.

It is a midsummer's dusk and nowhere near New Jersey. Where the sun has set clouds have conquered, spreading a solemn purple with a furnace flame at one point along a hillside peak extending high and wide, soft and still softer over half of heaven. The east is a fine deep blue with a rising, solitary star - the alabaster moon still beneath the horizon. This woman strides in blissful silence apart from the lapping of the waters on the shore.

A portrait of paradise before her.

Ravens and seagulls push each other inward and outward above the coast, the flap of their wings synchronous with each hypnotic crash of waves. A wistful waft, the ominous ocean breeze passes her body, covered only in the sheerest white dress, stealing what warmth the gradual set of the sun has not already. Longing for protection she seeks and finds herself between two dunes. The sea's salty breath calms and she stoops to pick up a handful of sand, but can't hold onto it. As the grains run between her fingers, returning to their home, perishing so does time itself. It reverses somehow, she is young. She is not pregnant. She is somebody completely different. Standing she sees a sharp shadow of a man's frame from behind her. But when she turns no man is there.

Only a rainbow.

A gentle shower, the sky's tears wash her face one drop by one until her hair is damp, her eyes the same shining cerulean as the sea, her smile infallible. An entire spectrum before her, the brilliance, the saturation is tempera on a translucent canvas. Violet, indigo, emerald. Yellow, cyan, magenta. The refraction of this arch is a prismatic epiphany.

Twilight's rainbow defies logic. Eventide is near, the rays of light needed to create such an ephemeral aesthetic are diminishing, but here it remains before her eyes. It is an intangible but reassuring companion. And she gazes at it, knowing somehow it is hers and hers alone, until stars spot the dimming horizon.

With a cool gust she blinks and a hand takes hers. And though she can't turn away from the rainbow, she knows that it's House. He stands at a distance, just bent fingers and bone, a peripheral shadow. But his presence brings comfort, an inspirational union of imagination and reality, and she realizes that they've created this rainbow together, somehow against odds and reason, but hardly by accident.

In dreams the beach is the meeting place of two worlds, land and sea, which symbolizes the conscious and unconscious realms of the human psyche. But here it is more. More than a memory, more than a dream- a marriage of three worlds.

Cuddy is acknowledging something in her sleep, having a strange communion with her soul. Making a decision, a final wish, recognizing a long denied desire. She is committing to the pursuit of happiness.

House is not at her side the entire time. Watching her sleep would make his role in this overtly obvious. He wanders the halls when those who might suspect are around, not wanting to wait in his office, not wanting anybody to know he hasn't left since this all started.

In the middle of one night, when it's so quiet even the nurses seem sedated, and no other doctors are in sight, he slips into her room, turns the TV on and tells the baby how he almost died because his mother can't cook.

And falls asleep for the first time in days, at her side.

Morning brings the rising altercation of the season through a small window and the sun shines change on four closed eyes. Pale tiny toes are the first thing he sees and reaches to pull the blanket down and cover her cold feet. Turning his head he watches Cuddy breathe, so close, so beautiful, so alive and fast asleep. House can't take his eyes off her, he can't even blink, and though the hall is congested- they will have an audience, he leans in and kisses her softly on the lips. It is brief and warm and with his eyes closed he can pretend that it matters. Then he stands, picks up her chart, and feigns reading it while staring out the window, knowing she doesn't want him here, certain this is not the happy ending to some fractured fairy tale.

Briar Rose awakens, not from the kiss, but rather a kick. In the ribs and from her son. She sees House brooding in the early dawn, leaning on the window seal in lieu of his cane, he looks miserable, worried, lost. When he turns to see her awake they share a quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife, best friends, in this first moment of refuge from the recent weariness, the omniscient danger.

"What's wrong?

Why am I here?"

House turns around trying to conceal the elation he feels hearing the sound of her voice.

"You have Listeriosis."

"No...

Is the baby?"

"Fetus is fine."

A sigh of relief parts both of their mouths. House sits because the pain in his leg is interrupting the momentary defeat of his misery, and pulls out his flashlight to examine her pupils, to see her faultless sapphire eyes wide open and looking back at him.

"How do you feel?"

"I have a headache."

"Yeah, meningitis does that."

"How long have I been here?"

"Few days."

As her eyes adjust from the miniscule but blinding light, Cuddy sees the dark circles under his eyes, the week's worth of beard, and realizes he's been here the entire time. Consumed by gratitude, she conceals it,

"What made you think Listeria?

My only symptoms were bleeding and a fever."

"Process of elimination.

We initially approached it as a threatened miscarriage, my team were all blaming your '_donor_.' "

"Oh God, do they know?"

"No."

A beat.

"Not yet," under his breath.

He puts the flashlight in a pocket, leans away, and pretends he's not in love with her.

"I didn't know about the chemical pregnancy.

But that miscarriage shouldn't matter. We've run enough tests, there is absolutely nothing else wrong with you. You're both responding well to antibiotics and the infection should be gone before he's born..."

There's a smugness about the declaration of his victory, House is becoming House again.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me.

You got meningitis and endocarditis because I didn't diagnose you soon enough.

You almost died because of me."

Grateful eyes tell him 'almost' doesn't matter.

"Oh, _and_ I got you pregnant.

Blame me, don't thank me."

The poignancy of the remark leaves them both mute, and struggling to ignore how close they came to complete devastation. Denying that they were taking it all for granted. House turns her blanket down, lifts the hospital gown a little, and on an impulse runs a hand across her stomach, leaving it rest a few seconds longer than he intended.

"What are you doing?"

He blinks, trying to seem insensitive.

"Fondling a defenseless pregnant woman, obviously.

It's a hobby I picked up while you were unconscious."

He reaches for the ultrasound wand and drops a wad of lubricant from the tube onto her belly.

"House," she says trying to not be warmed by the familiar touch.

"You're right, I'll close the curtains, put on some mood music."

He turns the fetal doppler up so that the drum of their baby's heart echoes. The little boy moves, lives, takes shape on a small dim screen. It's the proof she needs, the reassurance. A man and a boy - a wide awake Lisa Cuddy finally has everything she's ever wanted before her.

"Thank you," she says.

And it's clear she means for everything. Giving her life, saving her life.

Just being here.

House nods and on the subtlest motion the impact of the last six months falls on him like a ballast, some immeasurable weight, all at once he sees how much he nearly lost, and for the first time in a long time, how much he still has. But he hasn't forgotten that it's all dependent on what she gives him.

What she wants from him, with him, if anything at all.

Cuddy stays in the hospital another week, occasionally slipping out of her room to do her job. House doesn't bother her much, brings her plenty of untainted food, half her wardrobe and most of her paperwork.

Even at this distance though, an eventual epiphany seizes House as he realizes that by saving her, by helping her, he has inevitably and without his own consent compromised everything he knows about life and replaced his simple, weightless and irresponsible bachelorhood with fatherhood.

In an existential contradiction even he can't understand it's not the whole burden of responsibility he fears. No, a day from his own childhood is replaying in his mind while the woman who's about to change everything for him recovers.

He was five, or maybe six.

John House was stationed in West Germany and the Cold War had the Western world frozen in nuclear expectation. It was spring but snow fell in defiance of the season. John was growing frustrated and impatient with his son who showed no interest and little promise in the ability to ride a bicycle. But Blithe insisted he keep trying to teach him. The training wheels had broken the previous summer so it was learn to ride or don't ride at all. House struggled with it, falling and falling again. John persisted with the "When I was your age..." shame as a last resort.

His father ran along side him forestalling collisions with trees and mail boxes, losing pride and confidence in his son the entire time. At the end of a week's worth of effort, John resigned from holding House's seat but stood beside him like the drill sergeant he was. House would pedal perseveringly, driven by the dread of disappointing his dad.

With no encouragement but this heartfelt desire to not disappoint.

And as he started to get the balance, to ride it on his own - stay upright long enough to pedal a considerable distance House, ecstatic, looked to his father to say as much and in the process of exclaiming his success saw that his father was no longer beside him. He panicked, braked and flew over the handle bars.

John laughed.

And though House had scraped his chin and fractured his arm, it was his heart that was broken.

Irreparably.

A callous or a scab or some figurative emotional barrier was created that day. At six years old he was filled with contempt, with anger, he was hurt and handling like a man, though he was only a little boy. He swore vengeance in the form of proving everybody wrong.

He became House.

And continued riding with the cast on his arm. He rode the bike everywhere, practicing, learning maneuvers ever pro cyclists could not do - all by the age of seven. It was his first obsession. At fifteen he had his first motorcycle.

Through all the physical and emotional abuse he was subjectedto by his father over the years of being a military brat, the memory of the bike incident is the one he can't block. Not only did his father abandon him, letting him fall, he was expecting it, amused by his failure. The injury and his childhood has deterred House from paternal aspirations but at the same time insured that he'll never make his father's mistakes.

He's is terrified of becoming that person. Of inheriting the parental incompetence. It's going to require a nurturing resistance, at six he swore he'd never do that to his son. And as an adult he swore he'd never have kids. It would after all, end his status as one himself. Outside looking in through the glass at a pregnant, radiant, Lisa Cuddy completely alone and working from her hospital bed, he realizes he did that.  
All of it.

And Greg House wants to be a grown up.

_**love and sleep**_

When she's finally discharged, House becomes an essential hindrance. Mostly out of paranoia, not being with her when she fell sick is his biggest regret. He stays with her most nights at first. His guitar, his bike helmet and a certain portion of his porn end up in her living room. But he never officially moves in. In an unintentional and subliminal way they slowly transition into espoused silhouettes, one day at a time.

The life they created continues growing and whether they realize it or want it, they draw closer to each other than they have ever let themselves be with anyone else.

August fades into September as the seasons change. The heat becomes tolerable, the garden state's foliage picturesque, and Cuddy's belly much, much bigger. She decides against lamaze, although a friend recommended a good instructor and class. Part of her knows that when it's time for the baby to arrive she's not going to be concerned about or concentrating on breathing techniques, no matter what. And lamaze requires a coach, a husband, a life partner, someone.

House would say 'yes' at this point, she knows, but can't ask him. It would be obscenely awkward, push to the foreground an issue they'd rather leave in the background for as long as possible.

What they have isn't courtship, it's friendship. It's not marriage.

It's complicated.

So she convinces herself that she already knows the real deal about birth, what to expect in terms of pain, duration of labor, and the various esoteric bodily movements and functions that occur during delivery that nobody ever talks about. That she's a doctor who doesn't need any advice on how to inhale or exhale. Still, part of her wishes they could go.

Cuddy does yoga until it becomes impossible. Both because of her body's bizarre shape and also because she can't hold any position longer than five seconds before having to pee.

The fact that she will have a real live, shrieking, shitting tiny person in less than four months still feels like fiction, for both of them. Reality comes in fleeting glimpses.

Cuddy sings to the baby as she soaps her protruding belly in the shower,

_You are my sunshine, my only sunshine__  
You make me happy when skies are gray__  
You'll never know dear how much I love you  
__Please don't take my sunshine away.__  
The other night dear as I was sleeping  
I dreamed I held you in my arms..._

And then she breaks down at the thought of how she had nearly lost it all. On days she drives to work, the little one enjoys getting a morning workout by gently pounding her lower abdomen, reminding her she's not alone and will never be again.

The surreality of it is sustained by House's refusal to admit that they have a relationship. He tells her he's just protecting his investment and she believes him. When he says the sleepovers are enhanced by her increasingly ample fun bags and the fact that she has Cinemax, she knows it's the truth. Never would she describe him, _her_ House as a paranoid, paternal husband type. His ego is still there, she thinks, he just doesn't want the guilt - he can't handle anyone else dying.

In actuality, Greg House is waging a secret war. Against himself. Against everything he's feeling - that he's never felt before.

And he's losing.

When he's with her he stays in the spare bedroom, what will be turned into the nursery. But he rarely sleeps. Just stares at the ceiling, takes a few vicodin and thinks about winter. Some nights Cuddy sleepwalks, shuffles into the room half conscious, lies down beside him and murmurs something about colors or a fragmented lullaby.

Those are the nights he sleeps.

The yearning for shared sleep, just to lay beside each other in the same bed is something neither can negate, though House assumes there's no space for him in hers, and offers to leave most nights. But she always finds an excuse for him to stay. So this is how it is.

The man's afraid to touch her in a way, recent events have proven how fragile she is, and their relationship is just as tenuous. It could all break, shatter, fall apart in an instant and they never forget it.

Sex is a recurring temporal theme due mostly to its physical denial. Though it only comes after the longing for coinciding slumber. Cuddy is all hormones - months of longing with the awareness that lovemaking can accomplish something, not just transitory but permanent, perpetual, inside her. And House has wanted to be with her again since the night he put the ring on her finger.

It's not that they aren't intimate, he brushes his teeth while she showers sometimes and on a peppermint whim sticks his head in and kisses her. But he doesn't shove his tongue down her throat or grope any of the parts of her he easily could. If Monmouth was their first date, this is all just their second.

Some nights, when the insomnia is agonizing, he tiptoes into her room, as quietly as his limp will allow and watches her sleep. House tells himself it's voyeurism more than vigilance but it takes all his will power to not collapse beside her, kiss her until morning and make love until they run out of time.

They become roommates, with an agenda, an impending responsibility, just trying to make this work. Sex they know would feel good but it's a calculated jeopardy and there is already so much cognitive dissonance in this situation that they continue avoiding the carnal in exchange for the consolatory.

When it becomes too much House takes one long look at her and retreats to the shower. He closes his eyes and lets his soap slicked hand slide and pull and jerk until he feels something, but too quickly it dissolves into the pounding downpour of hot water and is rinsed away before he can regret it. It's never enough. Coming is hardly relief, there is a need in him that doesn't dissipate when he dries off. A need intensified every moment she's in his field of view.

As autumn advances they get used to the charade, comfortable with otherwise uncomfortable circumstances. Cuddy starts considering names for their baby boy and both are contemplating the complications of keeping this casual.

The advantages of commitment.

It's been an unusual progression, from classmates to colleagues to lovers. And now parents. They never really dated, or sought each other out, it's all been cyclical -accidents, chance, luck. Somehow they skipped the entire exposition of normal relationships, of marriage, no wonder it is such a foreign concept.

It's as if they're approaching it backwards, or missing pieces ofthe puzzle, incapable of forming or ever seeing the whole picture.

But they confront it as well they can, that is by not addressing it at all.

They become best friends. A single soul dwelling in two bodies. Two volumes of one book. They become everything to each other- a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in an increasingly insane world.

House deals with her mood swings as best he can. When she's as petrified as an unmarried pregnant woman he makes her laugh. When she' irritable he argues with her and when she's happy he gets away with leaving the toilet seat up. Now he calls the fun bags boobie traps, and sneeks an admiring peek when it's possible, Cuddy sees him most times but pretends she doesn't. He bites his tongue every time he thinks of a crude joke about her rotundous ass, but can't manifest an appropriate complimentto commend her for not really gaining much weight.

House decides she's his ocean, she showed him an island of potential, waves of confusion and when he was drowning in his own selfish sorrows Cuddy rescued him. Time and time again she stood up for the man even when she knew he was wrong.

And to Cuddy he's the entire world. A world not born until he arrived. Michigan, the infarction, the night he took her hand, somehow it all led to this. He got her pregnant - repaid her for everything she's sacrificed for him, everything she's risked, he's reciprocating her loyalty. Gratitude, vertigo, and relentless love is all she can feel in his company.

Silence between them is comfortable.

It's isn't that they're inarticulate or uncommunicative, they just understand each other.  
Words are unnecessary.

One night she comes home late and utterly overwhelmed by everything. The preparation for the baby, how close they came to dying, how she's going to end up doing this all alone. She weeps for minutes in the foyer. And she isn't alone. House comes out of the darkness, takes her jacket and her purse and returns to take her hand. They sit on the couch and don't say a word. After a few minutes Cuddy leans to kiss him on the cheek and lies down, resting her head in his lap. He doesn't complain about his thigh, though it hurts, and in spite of being aroused by the very idea of her head between his legs, he's not considering how fantastic being fellated would be right now. No, all Greg House can think about with this sad sleeping beauty in his lap is why she's in pain, how he can fix it, and that he doesn't deserve her. As he strokes her hair, curling a long loose dark strand around a finger, cherishing the sound of her breath and the peaceful sight of closed eyes he sharesher suffering, feels her anxiety and loves her more than anything.

Tears don't cure, smiles are never accurate and some things never change, but as his ego rebels the manipulative bastard is slowly slipping into the beautiful guise of a loving husband.

_**presence without pain**_

House shaves her legs when it gets hard for her to reach her ankles. It is a marvelous intimacy, elevated by trust, the kind some couples don't have even after decades of being married. He is dressed and sitting beside the tub, his face flush, almost embarrassed by the honesty and simplicity of it all. Buoyed up and concealed by bubbles, Cuddy drifts while he runs the razor along a leg. He doesn't gawk at or rant about her breasts, he's impeccably gentle as if the warmth of the water, or the moment, melt something away. Soften some callous, some cynicism. As if running a blade along her flawless porcelain skin - without cutting her - is a new challenge, something more mundane but just as rewarding as a rare disease or revelatory diagnosis.

A hand lathering each limb is enough, it's closer to completion than his own hand will ever bring him. It fills him with such rare joy that he can hardly resist saying something, 'Lisa,' 'I love you,' 'You have nice knees,' _something_. But he's so confounded by his own happiness that he can't speak, silence is golden, like infinity, like the ring she still has.

When he's done House kisses the knee closest to him and rests his chin on it, staring at her, saying more with his eyes than words ever could.

It is a fantastic parallel he decides, to be with each other without hurting each other. Presence without pain. It is the struggle and failure of most relationships. And she's not bleeding, he didn't cut her once.

It doesn't stop there either.

As he helps her stand and hobble out of the tub, Cuddy almost pulls him in, it's such a maladroit effort. And he doesn't stare at her body, this body that inspires the same amount of awe now that it does arousal, no he looks at her face, her eyes, her hair, and wraps a towel around her in an equally possessive and protective embrace. Without thinking he calls her beautiful before he steps out to let her dress.

As the spare bedroom slowly transforms into the nursery, House stays at his apartment more. He had to make a life to keep himself in hers, and now that life is pushing him away,out of her life, eventually. And ironically.

He helps paint the room and choose a crib, which he has agreed to assemble.

One day when he's there alone, assembling the mahogany contraption, or really watching soap operas, the phone rings and he makes the mistake of answering it.

An egregious conversation with a stranger ensues.

"Hello," he says not really hearing himself, eyes glued to the television.

"Good afternoon. This is Miles. I'm with Land America Credit.

Could I speak to Lisa Cuddy please?"

A long pause. House still isn't listening.

"Hello?" the stranger asks.

"She's not here."

"Okay.

Is this her husband?"

A few consonants steal his attention.

"No," he says a certain strife in the two letters.

"With whom am I speaking then?"

'Her baby's daddy' House thinks of saying, but doesn't. It's too heavy a moment and all he can manage is,

"Nobody," under his breath.

It is a humble self realization and he hangs up immediately because the harbinger has given him an idea.

--

Later, as the mechanism that is his conscience makes progress, devising a malicious coup, Cuddy comes home gorgeous but exhausted with bags full of baby clothes, Rogaine for her live-in boyfriend and enough diapers to supply a small country consisting solely of newborns.

House feels like talking, like having another circular disclosure, longing for an exigent epiphany. He cavorts childishly helping her put things away.

"How was your day?" He asks. And she squints suspicious of his need to distract her with small talk.

"Fine."

"Some credit agency called. Said you should stop charging all your bondage gear to your Visa.  
S & M ironically does _not_ improve your credit rating.

It's not going to help when you need a new car"

"God House, did you wreck my Mercedes?"

"No."

"Why are you here?"

A beat.

"Came over to work on the uh, room. Brought my toolbelt, six pack of beer, but then the phone rang, which kept me from doing any actual work."

Cuddy sighs, frustrated and dejected. He offers,

"I can make dinner if you want. I mean since I'm already here. Do you like stir fry?"

"I do," She says instead of 'yes,' leaving House more fascinated than frightened by the combination of words.

They eat and talk, a certain tension mounts but they never discuss roles. They don't want to be actors again, just reading a script, cast in some drama they don't even have the rights to. In real life denial is easier, silence satisfying, and happy endings infrequent and convoluted.

They never say 'I love you,' rarely manage 'thank you' and don't call each other Greg or Lisa. But something changes. They start seeing each other differently, with rising deferential esteem- indirectly heralding all the love, thanks, luxury of newlyweds.

_**lies**_

Sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving it becomes unavoidable, at least for one of them. As Cuddy sits watching an old movie House appears beside her, takes the remote and changes it to football. Games, he thinks. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. When it reaches half time Cuddy puts her movie back on and wiggles restlessly, trying to get comfortable on a couch that simply doesn't fit anymore.

After a while, House takes the initiative,

"What are we doing?"

"Watching TV," she says the hormones tainting her tone with sarcasm.

"No, I mean...

What are we going to do? In seven weeks, when this part is over?"

Cuddy shakes her head. Their eyes disconnect. A beat.

"Do you want to get married?"

She freezes, stops breathing and doesn't answer. House clarifies,

"I don't mean to me. Just - to anyone. Ever?"

"I..." She starts.

"I don't know."

A profound lie.

"Do you?"

House shrugs, looking past her and down at the floor. Silence, stillness, effort to say something and then tranquil repose in the moment.

"Things are different now," he says as if it's resolution.

Cuddy nods. The television's droning does not quiet their internal discord. Their silent whispers in a world or noise. After a minute,

"Do you still have the ring?"

Shocked, she hesitates then reaches for it, in her wallet where it's been since the fateful day of her doctor's visit. Her heart is pounding and she swallows hard when her fingers touch it, fearing or anticipating a proposal. Her mind is racing, trying to run away from 'yes' but her heart is pushing her toward it with a force she cannot overcome. An inevitable inertia that began with this miraculous conception - a motion, a momentum that cannot be slowed let alone stopped. Her mind can formulate no response except 'yes.'

Holding her breath as she hands him it, overwhelmed by expectations she never knew she had, Cuddy squints and a smirk starts to shape.

But House doesn't get down on bended knee. He just examines the ring between his index finger and thumb a moment and then puts it in his pocket.

Cuddy blinks bowing her head. It is a resolved rejection, a familiar torment, an unexpected loss. Assuming it's because of her vague response she accepts that this is slowly reaching it's end and somehow feels everything and nothing in a simultaneous sigh. Smiling in the absence of spectacle. She wants to hate him for this but is flush with only the most unconditional and absolute love. She wants to cry but can't. 'Lisa House' sounded absurd in her head the last few months that she mused about it, but suddenly she misses it. Now she realizes, that she can't have it, it sounds like the most perfect nominal juxtaposition in the world.

Life doesn't come with guarantees.

Their intermittent affection wanes after this. Cuddy feels estranged, like they're divorced now. But House doesn't change, he continues preparing for the advent of a new life, and grins when she pulls away from his kisses, the way he does when he knows something nobody else even suspects.

Cuddy doesn't want to believe it. She can't decide whether he's deliberately building a barrier between them or if this is just intended to make eventual surrender more significant. She stops asking his opinion on names and though she is indecisive about the first, part of her is trying to tailor it to the middle - Gregory.

It's the least he deserves. Even if this does end between them in two months.

_**winter and a widening circle**_

People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to exist. But Cuddy sees no such line in the future. Only looking back brings her consolation. Summer, the days with House when they were both somebody other than dean and diagnostician, when they were their other selves. The future is insecurity and uncertainty. Nothing more than unrealized anxiety and fast approaching.

House works on the nursery instead of doing clinic duty and she lets him. He starts buying the necessities. Pacifiers, bibs, the most Bond gadget-like baby monitor he can find. She isn't having a baby shower. And has only told a few people outside the PPTH realm, this still doesn't feel likes it's happening for her.

It's a habitual refusal to get her hopes up, really. Though they never speak of the complications that could arise in the next few weeks, at birth, and after the baby's born, they know there are still risks, Cuddy never lets herself forget how easily it can all be lost, again. So in an ironic avoidance of reality, of the impending future, House is the one nesting.

As the frigid season progresses, House speculates. Watching Cuddy closely he sees that she's different. Most women want everything. They want to _own_ everything. His mail, his future, his fantasies. Cuddy's always been there, she's always had possession without wanting it, of his body, his soul. She's never wanted to own him and is willing to suffer so that he doesn't have to sacrifice. Somehow she knows the pleasure isn't owning a person. The pleasure is what they have.  
What they've always had. Having another contender in the room.

It's already marriage. Without the idealization or the illusory utopianism of American wedlock. What they have is real, it's working. It's never really been seduction. Adduction, yes. Serendipity.  
Luck, fate, chance, but that's no solution.

Early on the first day it snows, with a light head, weak stomach and heavy heart House makes breakfast. Coffee, whole grains and eggs scrambled as best he can. Cuddy sits at the kitchen table as despondent as the frost coated windows, her feet cold on the tile, gooseflesh and a constantly shifting baby making the start of winter seem less than adventitious.

She's not watching House, sort of behind her at the toaster, but he picks a plate up to finalize the ruse anyway, and puts it back down quietly. Then with resolute certainty, an intrepid stride, he walks over to the unsuspecting and somewhat sad mother-to-be and on the motion of putting his hands in front of her Cuddy sees it's not a dish covered with breakfast food, it's a necklace.  
A gold necklace. And on it:

A gold ring.

Before she can exhale, let alone say something, House clasps the chain at the back of her neck leaving her so captivated, so surprised, so indescribably happy that tears come before words.

Sitting, his eyes are bright, deep, searching and almost soft. There's a rare beauty in the interrogative harmony of his expression and formidable severity about this reluctant exposure.  
A crooked boyish smile forms, he goes to say something but doesn't, just stares at the nape of her neck knowing that for once he's done the right thing.

It's capricious more than romantic she knows, but she can't imagine a more perfect proposal. Neither sentimental nor meaningless, it's greater than a proposition and an answer more than a question. House tells her he wants her to have it and knows she won't wear it on a finger unless tax breaks are involved. He tries to make is sound like he was just insulted by her leaving it in her purse, but she knows this is his declaration, his promise -here, in her kitchen, matrimony, the world outside pure and white. Inside it's home, for the first time since she's lived here, she feels safe, like she belongs - with him, and never alone again.

Cuddy eats a little suppressing tears of joy but buried no less in an avalanche of emotion. Smiling, she laughs nervously at the strange security she now feels, understanding the paradox she felt in loving him for taking the ring back. When House gets her another glass of juice she's overcome with such unbridled passion, such candid appreciation that it takes what little logic is still residing in her lovelorn conscience to not take him by the hand and run like their lives depend on it to city hall. To finally get the piece of paper, ink and certification of what they can no longer deny is the last truth in the world.

Instead, she takes his hand when he sits, not knowing what else to do but hold onto him. Their fingers align, the corresponding contours of their palms fit together, it's the last piece of the puzzle.  
United it is a clasp commensurate to the gold around her neck.

As sentimentality seeps into the moment, or when the outside world begins intruding with traffic ambience and snow shovels scraping on gravel, House rants a little about the poeticism of a pregnant woman and guilty man standing in front of a justice of the peace. He gauges Cuddy's reaction but evokes no clues about her inclination. Morning ends when he reaches across the table to examine the ring, knowing they have more than a chain's connection and decides it's a formality they owe each other.

After this Cuddy wears the necklace everywhere but the shower, underneath her clothes and close to her heart, she decides is the most appropriate place for the ring. House is right.

He starts to act like the baby is as much his as hers and talks to their upside down offspring often, telling him that it's both brave and stupid to enter this world head first.

And that he's proud of him.

As it nears completion, there's no 'theme' for the baby's room. No matching Disney or animal patterns. Just a blue sky with a pale green border.

One night after she thinks House has gone, Cuddy takes a shower in an attempt to drown her doubt and anxieties as childbirth and this whole solitary single parent scenario becomes imminent.

Alone, it is a vain attempt.

When she gets out, in just her bathrobe, the gold on her night stand, hearing a hollow thump she goes to investigate. Finding House has snuck back in to finish the nursery, she watches him a while, seeing again somebody only she has ever known exists.

Something remarkable happens when he finishes assembling the baby's bed, however. The completed crib startles her. It makes the idea of a child entering her life more tangible. It makes it reality, disconcerting truth, not just a dream anymore. A kind of visual bridge between now and the end, just weeks -it solidifies just how permanently and completely her world will change. Cuddy stares at it for a few seconds, with a faint feeling and a raucous heart.  
Involuntarily she utters, "Oh, wow."

Then panic comes, an attack. An invasion. Her whole well being under siege.  
Tears build, her voice cracks,

"I don't know if I can do this," she admits to the pastel walls, afraid of seeming weak to the man in front of her.

House stands a long minute leaning on the object that's causing this reaction. He's not used to placating people, but wants to say something. Something that would ease the pain, silence the sobs, something that will change everything.

After several more stagnant seconds he takes her by the hand and out of the nursery, still searching for the right words. They end up in her bedroom, standing in front of a full length mirror, he's behind her, just tips of fingers on each side.

House kisses her high on a damp warm cheek, closes his eyes and whispers,

"You are doing this."

Staring at the reflection of their inseparable single form, the three of them, Cuddy can finally see how it all connects, how it's just meant to be this way. She turns and kisses him blush with solace as his long eyelashes flicker against her forehead, his lips faintly chapped but soft in the corners. The taste of him is homecoming, return, a journey's end.

The kiss is a calm exhilaration. An epilogue that feels like a prelude. It obliterates insecurity. Replaces doubt with relief. Cuddy opens her eyes just to see him and wonders when she fell so in love with him that the sight of his eye's lashes and lids leaves her breathless.  
Bearing his child makes her complete.

She sits on the bed, brings one of his hands to her face and rests her lips on it. A palm cradles her cheek while her fingers fumble with the button of his jeans. With her mouth pressed against his stomach, she unzips, the warmth of her breath making his legs falter, the sound of the zipper rediscovery.

Gravity transcends denim when Cuddy tugs at his pants. She keeps planting hot wet kisses all over his torso and can't resist letting a hand caress him through the cotton. As a fingers slides across the elastic it becomes unbearable to not have her lips on his so House leans down, kisses her tenderly and just hovers like this a minute staring into her eyes, staring past her eyes into some kind of lucid dream, a shared vision that they've somehow made real.  
They exchange air and revel in the exalted quiet.

When he collapses beside her on the mattress, House pauses before kissing her jaw and neck, teeth anchoring her bottom lip as he starts to peel the robe from her still shower moist body. She smells like the ocean and summer - an impossibly tangible memory and when it's off eternity is suddenly before them. Cuddy's round, full and undeniably perfect body. A certain fear and frailty in both their eyes. Their love and the consequences of their love is before them.  
This is the future, the hereafter.

This is forever.

The incandescent halo of the bedside lamp is defeated by the season's blue moonlight as it streaks across the room in victorious intervals. House runs his lips across her pale shoulder and brushes them against her eyelids. The room is cold, so he pulls the covers over her and then ventures beneath them, his hands and mouth incessantly everywhere, shrouded in cottony refuge. Loving her in the here but hidden way he always has. It is a gradual exploration of her geography but he doesn't need a map. Cuddy boxes her damp hair with her hands, squirming as he kisses and strokes her breasts, his tongue lapping languidly around each sensitive areola, his erection still hampered by boxerbriefs, pushing into her thigh.

Continuing the odyssey of her anatomy, House's beard scratches the swell of her stomach and he rests his chin at the bottom of it, grinning at the belly button that was an innie months before and is now unmistakably an outie. His lips stop at a hip and trail down her thigh, teasingly zigging and zagging to the inner and outer parts of the leg until he reaches the knee. Static breath builds and he starts his way up the other leg letting his mouth linger just below this hip.

With his forehead resting on the limb he almost sighs, attempting to dream. It's not hesitation, he wants her. Now and in any way she wants to be taken. But part of him thinks this is a dream. And he doesn't want to wake up he wants to dream more. Verve inside conception, vision inside illusion, infinite dreams one framed by the other until he is so consumed by rhapsody that it becomes his only reality.

Blinking he blows, a waft of warm air eliciting a gasp, Cuddy preparing herself for what will happen next. Restrained, he pushes the need for his own release to the corner of his mind, bearing up her fragility on his strong arms until she's poised, nothing but molecules of thin air between her pleasure and his lips.

In light kisses he flicks his tongue along her slippery folds, smoothing away hair, parting the lips gently with his fingers and moving slowly inwards with his mouth, nuzzling at first, his nose abundantly present. Cuddy whimpers in suspense, not believing this is all happening. Or what it means. She can't see what he's doing or what he's going to do next. It's tantalizing agony - each touch is a surprise every sensation is unexpected.

After tracing a path from the crease of her thigh down with firm fingertips he slides two inside her. Rubbing at the tender spot that gets her keening, a high helpless sound like nothing else he's ever heard. Without her consent Cuddy's pelvis starts rocking against his hand.

When he can tell she's nearing the brink, his fingers curl and she squeals, clenching before they evacuate to be replaced by his burrowing tongue. Cuddy bucks erratically as it thrusts into her, his hands trying to keep her still, long hot fingers creeping down her leg and then back up, until he can't resist dipping them inside her again. As he laps and massages with his mouth her back arches and body sways, forcing him deeper.

The tilt of her hips is tension, the pleasure sharp and advancing making her toes curl and her hands fist into her comforter. House lets his teeth glide over the delicate skin and she moans in expectation. Each sound from her resonates through his body in pulses, making his passion more palpable. His rough cheek grazes her supple thigh, just letting his palate absorb the salty sweet deliciousness of her imminent orgasm. The blanket's shadows crosshatch along their bodies as the silhouette that is House delves deeper.

Savoring the delectable flavor he sucks and slurps, slick and still stroking inside her. Suddenly she tightens around his fingers. With a sharp gasp and involuntary flutter of her muscles Cuddy comes hard, jolting against his hands and saturating his mouth. A guttural moan and his lips vibrate against her making her writhe uncontrollably beneath his palms. The pressure's perfect extending the euphoric release, it lasts minutes -months of mounted pleasure washing over her in waves and he stays with her kissing, licking up the exquisite ambrosial taste, suffusing as he salivates until they melt together in a satiated puddle on the sheets.

House is still gripping her thigh as the lift of her hips drops letting him draw spirals on the dimly illuminated limb with the moisture on his fingertips. He strokes and caresses lightly while she tries in vain to prepare for what he's going to do next.

"I love you," he says into the curve of her belly.

No sound, just irreverent lips on immaculate skin.

Though she can't hear him, Cuddy feels the phrase, the friction and the flow as his mouth forms the words, so warm, so real. She doesn't even know if he's saying it to her, the baby or at all, but a spontaneous second orgasm seizes her and she succumbs, the shock taking her breath away. He's barely touching her but the vigor, the brilliance is electricity, it's invincibility. Maybe it's not an orgasm. It's something more, beyond physical pleasure, some involuntary reaction to his intuitive confession. The exhilaration of his honesty, the mutual exposure. Maybe just the thought, the possibility of the narcissistic, abrasive, egomaniacal bastard admitting that he loves her makes the woman come. He stays there while the sensation elevates and dissipates, kissing down both legs, massaging the arch of her foot when her toes uncurl and smiling a proud smile.

After a minute, coerced from the closure of being under the covers, House comes up. He kisses her lightly on the lips, protectively on the forehead and when he reaches to turn the light out sees that the necklace is on the night stand. Rolling onto his side, he fits behind her, trying to find his place.

The warmth of his body makes her drowsy. Cuddy takes his arm snugly settling into a new series of readjustments, ringing it around her as if she wants it to be right because it's going to be there forever. His skin is ardor against hers, his breathing melodic as a lullaby. House's ribs notch into her vertebrae while his knee bends against the back of her leg, the rasp of his hairy calf inducing a rare relaxation she only experiences with a familiar and masculine presence beside her. Outside the snow is falling, burying the world in ice and inclemency but in his arms, in her bed it's serenity, safety, it's summer again.

With no motives other than the sight of her still open eyes, House, following a fleeting stretch of time, kisses her neck and behind an ear, brushes his cheek along a shoulder and reawakens the near sleeping beauty. Spooning, she can feel the throb of him, and can't resist provocation, pushing back against him. Their limbs crisscross, ankles tangle, toes twine. They just do this for a while.  
Flirt, librate, a cozy horizontal dance. He blows into her ear then nibbles on it. When she needs to feel his skin on hers, Cuddy stretches a hand back, overestimating her reach and slides it into the back of his briefs, caressing each cheek and slowly inching the cotton down. His lips roam aimlessly across the bluff of her back, down each shoulder blade and finally he pivots forward to kiss the corner of her mouth.

She's aware when it happens, that thing, the connection. This time it's in the moment of prepenetrative anticipation, but many times it's in the aftermath of an argument- the rage, the energy, the passion they finally requite.

The expectation of retaliation.

It's different now. The thrill's intensified by personal proximity, by concentrating all emotion into a transient glimpse of happiness, unadulterated desire, approximate love. It goes beyond intimacy, it's an almost ethereal connection, the most ephemeral fusion, precognitive union.

When he penetrates her Cuddy doesn't gasp of shiver, she relaxes. She exhales.  
Because she's been holding her breath. Waiting months for this. It isn't some carnal hunger, it's discovery: finding the missing piece of the puzzle, it's not lust it's the difference between being empty and being whole.

House takes his time. Not to prolong the ecstasy that still feels new, the experience that's different every time. No, he just wants to be in her for as long as possible. To be a part of her, physically if no other way. To deny a few hours longer that he's just temporary. That this is all just the result of some convenient accident.

Holding her closer than ever, each thrust is strong but shallow, each movement a throe of accumulative enthusiasm. Even the air around them is charged. Torsos align, the tickle of his chest hair slickened by sweat smears across her back. Cuddy's astonishingly pert astoundingly plump ass form fits into his pelvic contours and there's a brief transfer of power when she starts moving against his thrusts rather than with them, taunting him, goading him to drive deeper, harder, faster.

At first House cradles her breasts or traces circles around her clit, never letting her forget he has two free hands. When his thumb rubs over a taut nipple she reaches back and fondles his testicles, stretching to massage his perineum. With a low desperate grunt, she feels him thicken inside her and relents as he slows down.

Side by side they find a new rhythm.

Fantastic and deliberate, salaciously centripetal motion, she grinds against him as he drives into her, searching for a center, a destination, bound and navigating.

Cuddy's almost forgotten what it feels like to have him inside her. How perfectly their parts fit together. That in this way, if no other, they're simply made for each other. It feels so good, so right she can hardly resist squeezing and coaxing the heat out of him just to feel it spread through her. There's an immediacy to making him happy, relieving him the way he did her. The temptation to instigate his euphoria, responsibility for his release, Cuddy wants to make him come. In her, for her, with her. Now.

Except she's beginning to accept that this may never happen again so she holds back, just ardent, expectant and present, wanting this to last more than anything, wanting it to be perfect, wanting him to still want her when this is over.

Wanting him to want her more.

It should always been like this, House thinks, each of them protecting the other against everyone else. Each of them to the other _comprising_ everyone else. Bare, complete and dancing beyond the ordeal of the rest of the world a little while longer. In this blissful preorgasmic instant he knows that their coupling is more than the drama into which they decant all the angry disappointment of their lives. It's success, it's become unconditional, and here, now he can deny that  
it's obscenely evanescent.

Cuddy's about to unravel with House's arms wrapped around her, his face pushed into her shoulder, her muscles clench to entice him but she only succeeds in inciting her own ecstasy.

It's amazing to be in her, the heat, the moisture and genuine sense of belonging. He steadies his hips as she shudders, motionless until she nods and they start again, his lips on her neck, hands between her legs, over her stomach and breasts, holding her tight, moving slower, smoother, reminiscent escalation.

"God," she says. And says again. And again.

Until it's an endearment. Until it's his identity.

Because right now entangled with this man, dissolving into each other, on the verge of convergent vulnerability, the edge of exaltation, she worships him. It's more than love, it's impossible piety, it's all her life's passion being focused and directed at one person. It's not commitment, it's faith. House is God to her now, her whole world, more than her whole world, her hope of heaven. His broken body and misery marred eyes are between her and every thought of religion, he's an idol, a hero, he's everything because he did this for her. With her. He didn't let it die.

When the pressure is paragon, she feels the flare of his aura into hers.

"God I love you," is what Cuddy thinks she says, but this time she substitutes one misnomer for another. She calls him Greg.

Forsaking resistance, his pace quickens and he thrusts deeper. The urgency culminates, he closes his eyes and moves with her, in her, until he feels the cusp of her convulsions and then he lets go.

House inhales, he gasps like it's his last breath, slow and deep reveling in the scent of this woman, her perfume, her pheromones, the prepossessing fervor of her skin. Her muscles catch and clutch, remembering. Reciprocal rapture as his orgasm becomes hers, consuming him, filling her.  
A synchronous spectral panorama - they see every color at once in a world that's been black and white for months.

Cuddy turns her head back to see his tranquilly azure gaze through the dark fringe of long lashes, he's staring at her, smiling at the spectacle of what he can do to her. What he can do _with_ her. Cherishing her countenance as they coalesce. Coveting the deep pools of blue and black that are her eyes as they combine. Again. She kisses him softly on the lips, to taste him, to merge even more and to get him to close his eyes because she's ineffably and equally relieved, susceptible, and satisfied.

The duality of body and soul, the physical and metaphysical, psychological and emotional are suddenly in the foreground as the consummate completion continues. Pumping, gushing, and then motionless, more than it ever was.

Their awareness of a purpose, to transform from creation to creator, letting two become one is more than love, shelter, belonging or companionship. It's completion. It unity. It's matrimony.

It may be the last time.

Both suspect that every simultaneous surrender they share may be the last.  
Neither wants this to end but both expect it.

They remain undivided and tangent a long while. When she yawns House pulls out reluctantly and lays on his back a few minutes. The adrenaline and endorphins ebb into afterglow and the glimmer fades rapidly as reality recurs. Then, as if he suddenly realized that they just made love, that she came three times and he was utterly inarticulate for each, he feels an all consuming impulse to say something. Bracing on an elbow he leans into the sleeping beauty one last time to kiss her, to wake her, to speak. Cuddy kisses back, all four eyes closed, the suspension of disbelief waning - it feels like the end of some fantastic dream.

An ending that requires a profound proclamation, "Lisa," "Marry me," "Now."  
Something that would only matter with his lips on hers. Suddenly he's stricken also with the overwhelming and irrational need to hear her voice, to feel the vibrations of her words on his mouth, to swallow her idealized reciprocity. To know that she loves him as much as he loves her.

Say something. Say _any_thing.

Aphony, reticence, the sound of a winded diagnostician's chest heaving but no words. The clamor and scrape of snow plows, but no plea, no proposal.

Nothing.

House collapses undespairingly beside her, stretches an arm behind but not around Cuddy and broods. Loathing himself for not talking, for not making this everything it could be, everything it should be.

Panic comes as he starts to doze off. The same panic that forced this winter's night into intimacy. The panic that allowed them to recapture what they were both doubting was revivable. Except it's not the foreboding burden that the finished crib caused Cuddy. No, for House the completion of that bed, the finished room and his long sustained subconscious procrastination in finishing it all clearly mean something. Now that it's done, he may be done. It's all he offered to do.  
It's all she expected him to do. This may be over before it begins.

The end of the end.

He doesn't understand his panic, why he feels anxiety instead of relief for being spared the responsibility of a wife and kid. He can only explain it in terms of selfishness, they're his. He doesn't deserve them, he knows. And has no idea why it's ending here.

Cuddy still hasn't told anybody that the baby's his. He isn't sure how the secret's been kept. Other than Thirteen's fear of the news of her mortality leaking. House has joked dozens of times about the identity Cuddy's baby's daddy. And he's joked about impregnating her, yet this scenario seems so absurd that nobody suspects.

Reality betrays us all.

Though he chastises himself for being not just affected by her denial, but also insulted, it still hurts in an unfamiliar pang of blighted hope. Because not only has she failed to mention he's the one that did this to her, she's not wearing the neckless now. The interpretation of both leave him convinced beginnings aren't so simple, and goodbye is what she wants.

The temperature plummets, House is cold. It's more than a shiver, it's an existential chill. His ego is frozen. Suddenly aware of his nudity, he anxiously tugs the blanket away from her a little and stares, the peace of her face reflecting off of the pain in his eyes. Abruptly, Cuddy turns over inadvertently looping his arm around her and pressing her round belly into his side. He readjusts and she nestles into his embrace as if he's a downy stack of pillows and not cool flesh and sharp bone. Hooking a leg over his hip, she drapes a lithe arm across the breadth of his chest, comfortable with him, somehow that hurts even more.

Pain with presence, a cruel reversal of circumstances.

With certain hesitation he strokes down the length of the arm gently, rests his hand on her stomach and leaves it there. He's waiting to feel their child kick or move, remind him that this is all real. But it doesn't come, baby is as asleep as his mother. When he sees goosebumps on her forearm he relinquishes his portion of the blanket and wraps it around them tight, tucking them in together, staying separate. At a distance.

House decides that until now it's been like a ship in a bottle. Impossible, intangible, some magnificently complex thing they created, confined for nine months just to potential and always at risk for shattering. Marvelous, elaborate, _impossible_, in jeopardy - it's demise a constant fear. It redefined their limits, together they've escaped predestined boundaries and achieved something they could not have done alone. He's pursued the absolute for so long and has now accidentally attained the infinite. Her stomach is a wine bottle with his hand on it, struggling to believe the ship they built is real.

Before he can fall asleep, reality's betrayal relents and Greg House is forced wide awake by the movement of that elusive animation of the life he's created. He's struggling to decide what he really wants. The indecision is a tug of war, a revolt of his ego against his conscience.  
His heart combatting his brain.

It is a stalemate.

Considering birth, how things will change, if he wants them to change, he watches her a while longer, her cheek against his shoulder, her breath filling the hollow of his collarbone and when she moves closer unconscious but somehow consolatory, putting her head on his chest House trails his fingers through her hair and makes a decision.

He wants to be the doctor who puts Cuddy's trembling legs in stirrups and delivers their child. The last to see her before motherhood and the first to hold their son. He wants to be  
the man - a husband who holds her hand and stands by her side. To coach and encourage, maybe.

He just wants to be there.

House wants to be the first person to see their baby's new eyes- to find salvation, permanence, honesty - redemption.

What will the narcissist see when he looks into his son's eyes?  
Himself? Truth?

What will their child see when he looks into his father's eyes?  
Lies? A damaged nihilist?

Will the atheist see an angel? Or will the doctor's desire to be God finally be fulfilled?

Beyond perception, what will happen after? Will convention come naturally, will his presence be uninvited, will it all fall apart?

Or into place?

Greg House is not a husband. He's not a father. He's a doctor. An accomplice. But he _wants_ to be something more. More than a warm body in an empty space on her bed. More than the weather against her window as she sleeps through a winter's dream.

More than this.

With closed eyes House reaches for the necklace. Uncertain what he's going to do next, he slides the ring off the chain and sighs. Soft moonlight diffused by pale curtains illuminates the jewelry in the darkness and for the first time ever he understands the aesthetic virtue of a gold circle. Cuddy's fingers are splayed across his chest and he just enjoys it, her warm palm on his cold skin, the constancy of her touch.

Again a hand seeks the adjacent flesh and sorrow parallels desire in the immense complexity of love. Stroking her hand with his thumb it's barely a grasp, barely a glance. For an instant he contemplates with the few remnants of his objectivity why in his life it must perpetually be all or nothing at all. Then he puts the ring on her finger. Not to see if it fits, or to propose marriage, just to see eternity again before his eyes and with her. He holds her tighter hoping that the heat of oppression might make her uncomfortable, might wake her. He still wants to talk. A transitory whim, he knows, there's nothing he could say that would make her change her mind. If her mind's made up. But she doesn't stir. Somehow her subliminal awareness that he's with her makes her fall deeper into slumber. So House's grip loosens, allowing a certain space between them.

Everybody lies. Is he just lying to himself? Does complacency just seem more convenient than the complete abandonment of his old lifestyle? Somewhere behind the perpetual cynicism and beneath the existential callous House knows he's already changed. An irreversible change.  
A permanent eversion. In nine months he's transformed more than the pregnant woman.  
The birth of his son will be his own rebirth. Restoration, reincarnation- he can only long to not experience it alone.

By now the pain is reclaiming his leg and he wants to reach for the vicodin, or get up and distract the agony away by pacing, by leaving, but he's torn. House can't let go of her hand, he doesn't even want to try. When he finally blinks his eyes find asylum in the opacity of the room, sanctuary in the solace of her bed and beauty in the woman by his side.

Decidedly, he grins. A naked obstinate grin. He will fall asleep with that grin composing his face because he's going to leave the ring on her finger. He's going to hold her and listen to her breathe and think of last summer and the new year. Of how he almost died and how he wants to live now, for her. With them.

House will dream of a future, consider their past and sleep with her.  
The first and final yearning, the crucial desire for shared sleep, a blatant and impartial preference which is true love.

Outside December's pure impatient banks await resolution, content with silence until tomorrow. With a clasp of hands, presence, pain, and peace these two souls will dream, refusing to let go of each other. They have shared this winter, they will share tonight and if she's still wearing the ring when he awakens, they'll share their lives.

Together. In the morning.

Everything.


End file.
